The proactive employee: Managing workplace initiative

TLDR

Organizational initiatives such as job enrichment, participation, empowerment, and transformational leadership aim to expand employee roles, adding new expectations of enterprising qualities and personal integrity that create differing judgments and initiative expectations among firms, managers, and employees. The article investigates how these initiatives serve as role‑expansion mechanisms and delineate five proactive‑employee characteristics, while exploring implications of expectation differences and offering fit‑based recommendations. The authors analyze expectation differences, assess person‑environment fit, and recommend strategies for managing the resulting challenges. The study concludes that the evolving employee role blurs the manager‑employee boundary, reshaping traditional managerial responsibilities.

Abstract

Executive Overview Business and behavioral undertakings such as job enrichment, participation, empowerment, and transformational leadership are organizational attempts to expand the employee role. This article examines a number of these undertakings to illustrate how they function as role-expansion mechanisms, and how they implicitly define five role characteristics generally reflective of a proactive employee. While job and task competence, interpersonal effectiveness, and organizational orientation have always been associated with the employee role, the other two role characteristics—enterprising qualities and personal integrity—represent relatively new expectations. These new demands raise some important issues for firms and managers, centered on differences associated with the firm's, the manager's, and the employee's expectations regarding the use of judgment and initiative. The article examines some implications of these differences, discusses person-environment fit considerations, and proposes recommendations for handling the problem. It concludes with a discussion of how the continuing evolution of the employee role blurs the traditional line between manager and employee, and how this affects the traditional managerial role.