In global virtual teams, creative performance is influenced by both stable individual traits and dynamic moment-to-moment behaviors. Guided by Social Cognitive Theory and Conservation of Resources Theory, this study examines how proactive personality predicts stable engagement and creativity, and how within-person fluctuations in effort and creative idea quality influence one another across time. Utilizing a four-wave longitudinal design and RI – CLPM framework, we successfully distinguished stable between – person tendencies from momentary within-person changes. This analysis yielded a discernible reciprocal effort–creativity cycle: when individuals engaged more intensely than usual at time t, they produced higher-quality creative ideas at time t+1 (β = 0.180, p < .001). Conversely, periods of heightened creativity contributed to increased engagement in subsequent phases (β = 0.078, p < .001). Despite its bidirectional nature, the effect from effort to creativity was found to be notably stronger, suggesting that effort functions as a primary resource that initiates a Creative Resource Gain Spiral across time. At the between-person level, individuals with more stable proactive tendencies consistently exhibited higher levels of average engagement (β = 0.119, p < .001). The accumulation of engagement resources resulted in significant cross-level consequences, with stable effort exhibiting a string prediction of distal team creative performance (β = 0.816, p = .029). This underscores the role of enduring individual resource investment in shaping collective creative outcomes within global virtual teams. This study is among the first to use an RI-CLPM framework to demonstrate a bidirectional effort - creativity cycle within global virtual teams and provides new evidence for dynamic resource processes in distributed collaboration. At the team level, contextual characteristics such as average team age (β = 0.050, p
