Affect and Proactivity in Teams

The relationship between affect and proactivity is established at the employee level of analysis. Individuals’ positive and negative moods have the potential to drive proactive problem prevention, voice behaviour, and taking charge due to information processing and motivational processes (Cangiano, Bindl, and Parker, 2017). In addition, the relationship between affect and proactivity can also operate at the team level of analysis through interpersonal mechanisms and social integration processes; however, theory and empirical research about how team affect is related to team proactivity is still underdeveloped. This is a sensitive limitation in the proactivity literature because in today’s organizations teamwork is an essential form of organizing work, due to the complexities of tasks that cannot be executed by individual employees. Also, teamwork helps ensure rapid responses to environmental demands, facilitates creativity and innovation and increases the likelihood of achieving high quality outcomes. Therefore, teamwork contributes to the effectiveness of organizations and even their survival. Thus, to further develop the affect and proactivity literature, in this chapter we survey and discuss emergent research on affect at the group level of analysis and how and when the effects of group affect on proactivity are likely to happen. Accordingly, in the first section, we present the team effectiveness model in which team level affect and proactivity occur, together with describing the psychological processes that explain their reciprocal relationships. Then, we present and discuss the theory and evidence about the etiology of affect and proactivity in the context of teamwork.