Proactive Behavior in Organizations

TLDR

Proactive behavior is increasingly viewed as a key component of job performance, yet research on its antecedents and consequences spans multiple literatures with varied definitions and measurement approaches. This article reviews a diverse set of literatures that directly address proactive behavior in organizational contexts. The review outlines four constructs—proactive personality, personal initiative, role breadth self‑efficacy, and taking charge—and examines six research domains: socialization, feedback seeking, issue selling, innovation, career management, and stress management. Based on these streams, the author analyzes differing approaches to studying proactive behavior and proposes suggestions for future research.

Abstract

Many practitioner-oriented publications argue that managers should be more proactive on the job, and that proactive behavior is an increasingly important component of job performance. Organizational research on the antecedents and consequences of proactive behavior has appeared in several different literatures and has taken different approaches toward defining, measuring, and understanding proactivity. In this article, I review a diverse set of literatures that directly address proactive behavior in organizational contexts. I describe four constructs related to proactive behavior: proactive personality, personal initiative, role breadth self-efficacy, and taking charge. Next, I review six research domains that have explicitly addressed proactive behaviors: socialization, feedback seeking, issue selling, innovation, career management, and certain kinds of stress management. After considering findings from these research streams, I offer an analysis of the different approaches to the study of proactive behavior and provide a set of suggestions for future research.