Meaning matters: linking proactive vitality management to subjective well-being

Abstract

Prior research has indicated that positive affect, energy, and vitality are positively related to subjective well-being. Unfortunately, most scholars have overlooked the possibility that individuals may proactively manage their energetic, affective, and cognitive resources to boost their subjective well-being. Grounded in social cognitive theory, the current research focuses on explaining why students’ proactive vitality management (PVM) leads to positive outcomes (i.e., meaning in life, subjective well-being) and considers how school support climate moderates these effects. One experimental study (Study 1) and a three-wave lagged survey (Study 2) were conducted to examine the benefits of PVM. The results demonstrated that PVM was positively related to students’ meaning in life, further promoting their subjective well-being. Moreover, school support climate accentuated PVM’s effect on meaning in life and its indirect effect on subjective well-being via meaning in life. Implications for research and practice are also discussed, along with study limitations and future research directions.

Keywords:

• Meaning in life
• proactive vitality management
• school support climate
• social cognitive theory
• subjective well-being

Author notes

Jianwei Zhang, a professor at the School of Education at Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China.

Wenfeng Zheng (Corresponding author), doctoral student of the School of Education, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China.

Haihong Li, a young scholar at the School of Business Administration, Shandong University of Finance and Economics, Jinan, China.

Weijun Hua, a young scholar at School of Marxism, Shijiazhuang Tiedao University, Shijiazhuang, China.

MengMeng Fu, doctoral student of the School of Education, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Ethical approval

Ethical approval was granted by the Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China. All procedures were conducted in accordance with the relevant guidelines and regulations.

Data availability statement

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Key Project of the National Social Science Foundation of China (22AZD026), and the National Science Foundation of China (72074024).