User:MGMT90018 2015S2 Proactive Behaviour/sandbox

= What is proactive behaviour =

Definitions
There are several dictionary definitions and researcher definitions with regard to to the concept of proactivity, proactive or proactive behaviour. Oxford Learner's Dictionaries defines proactive as "creating or controlling a situation rather than just responding to it after it has happened", while Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines proactive as "acting in anticipation of future problems, needs, or changes". Proactive behaviour is defined by researchers as "self-initiated and future-oriented action that aims to change and improve the situation or oneself". It also refers to "taking the initiative in improving current circumstances; it involves challenging the status quo rather than passively adapting to present conditions".

Key elements
Even though there is no single definition regarding to the concept of proactive or proactive behaviour, a consensus emerging on the elements of proactive behaviour has been achieved in recent years. As suggested in Parker & Collins, the proactive behaviour involves anticipation, taking control and self-initiated nature, and these three key elements are present in most definitions of proactive behaviour. Anticipatory element means acting in advance of a future situation, rather than just reacting. Taking control means causing something to happen instead of just waiting for something to happen. Self-initiated indicates that individuals do not need to be asked to act nor need detailed instructions.

Examples and applications
Examples of proactive behaviour include:

A sales manager uses his initiative to anticipate and adjust present sale price and inventory volume, in order to meet the anticipated future customer demands, instead of just waiting the fluctuations of future demand.

Instead of just waiting for the doctor to come to see a patient, a nurse anticipates what equipment that the doctor might use in the following examination, and prepares those equipments for the doctor, in order to make the doctor's examination more efficient.

A manager, on her or his own initiative, has come up with a way of reducing electricity used in the office.

Proactive behaviours are widely considered in organisations in recent years, and also received emphasis in organisational literature. Some organisations highly value proactive behaviours of employees, believing those proactive behaviours could bring benefits to the organisation and result in increased organizational effectiveness. Employees with proactivity actively seek information and opportunities for improvement, rather than just passively waiting for information and opportunities to come to them. However, some supervisors in organisations do not always appreciate proactivity of their employees, seeing proactive behaviour as a threat, an ingratiation attempt,, or an ill-timed distraction.

= History and current research = Early in the 1960s, Swietlik (1968) sought to integrate the diverse views presented by contemporary theorists on personality structure under the rubric of 'reacting personality' or 'proactive personality', however, the paper did not draw much attention at that time. Ashford and Cummings completed one of the first studies on a specific type of proactive behaviour, feedback seeking behaviour, in 1985. In the 1990s, more research on the proactive personality emerged, and concepts that focus on specific situations that demand proactivity was developed. In 1993, Bateman and Crant introduced the concept and defined the proactive personality, contrasted the approach and behaviours that individual conduct toward environment with those of passive individuals. Some concepts and forms of proactive behaviours, such as expressing voice, taking charge and selling critical issues to management, grew rapidly during this period of time. These isolated proactive concepts were not integrated until 2000. In 2000, Crant presented the first integrative framework, categorising proactive behaviours into general actions and contextual behaviours two ways. Since a few years, research on proactive behaviours has been in a more general framework, and all organizational behaviours were integrated by nature proactive.

The current research has largely been contributed by Parker and Collins. They conducted empirical investigations and integrated various separate proactive behaviours examined by other scholars into three broader categories-proactive work behaviours, proactive strategic behaviours, and proactive person-environmental fit behaviours. Research on the antecedents of proactive is also conducted by several scholars. Grant and Ashford focused on a sample of antecedents and explained the general phenomenon of proactivity. In Parker and Collins's research, proactive personality, learning goal orientation and consideration of future consequences were found to be an antecedent to the proactive work behaviours, including taking charge, individual innovations, problem prevention, and voice.

= Types of proactive behaviours =

Specific proactive behaviours
Particular proactive behaviours occurring within a narrow context have been studied, which include:


 * 1) Socialisation and network building. Newcomers who adopt the proactive approach will initiate socialisation and network building themselves rather than passively waiting for others help or guidance.  When first entering a new working environment, they will actively adapt to new working conditions through seeking information, clarifying roles and so on.
 * 2) Feedback seeking. Individuals could take a proactive approach by asking for feedback from supervisors directly or getting implicit information through observation. Individuals will proactively seek feedback when they find it useful to be used as a guidance which will contribute to their success.
 * 3) Issue selling and expressing voice.  Middle managers voluntarily get involved with decision-making process by getting their voice heard by top managers. Speaking up and intending to make  contributions to  organisations.
 * 4) Individual innovation. Proactive behaviours are involved with every stage of innovation process, including identifying problems, thinking of new ideas and applying to practice.
 * 5) Career management. People initiate a new career situation and adjust to new changes in a proactive way rather than respond passively to imposed changes.
 * 6) Stress management. Proactive stress management occurs when people take actions to prevent or modify a potentially stressful situation before it actually happens.
 * 7) Taking charge. In order to make an improvement, individuals volunteer to take efforts to share responsibility and impose positive effect on organisational functions.
 * 8) Problem prevention and solving. Proactive behaviours in this area include voluntarily self-directed actions to prevent reoccurrence of problems, and creatively solving problems before they actually happen by implementing new ideas.

Broad proactive behaviours
'''However, research on proactivity "has not emerged as an integrated research stream... there is no single definition, theory, or measure driving this body of work." To address this issue, three broad categories of proactive behaviours have been identified, which include: '''


 * 1) Proactive work behaviour - aimed at changing the internal organization environment (e.g. Taking charge, Voice, Individual innovation, Problem prevention)
 * 2) Proactive strategic behaviour - aimed at changing the organization's fit with the external environment (e.g. Strategic scanning, Issue selling credibility, Issue selling willingness)
 * 3) Proactive person-environment fit behaviour - aimed at changing the individual's fit within the organizational environment (e.g. Feedback inquiry, Feedback monitoring, Job change negotiation, Career initiative).

= Antecedents =

Situational ambiguity
Situational ambiguity, including unclear role directions and obscure tasks instructions, environmental uncertainty, career transitions, and organisational change, is a common circumstance that exposes employees to the risk of uncertainty. When employees encounter the ambiguity of situation, they are more likely to obtain information and figure out the significance, intention, and targets of their actions to reduce the level of uncertainty. In conclusion, the ambiguity of situation motivates people to exhibit proactive behaviours such as acquiring feedback, constructing social networks, and negotiating job changes.

Employee empowerment
Employee empowerment is offering employees a proper degree of authority and responsibility for decision-making according to their specific goals to create value for the organization. It allows decisions to be made at a lower level of the company at which employees detect and response issues of the organization and market more sensitively and directly. This kind of appropriate autonomy increases efficacy by indicating employees that they have the capability and chance to take initiative, change their tasks, broaden their rules, craft their jobs, and construct their skills, and also enabling employees to select roles, tasks, jobs, and relationships according to their interests and skills. As a consequence, employees are more willing to anticipate, schedule, and act beforehand to gain desired results. Therefore, under conditions of autonomy, employees are more likely to display proactive behaviours such as problem-solving and idea implementation, prosocial rule-breaking, and role expansion.

Coworker trust
Coworker trust, including confidence in others' abilities and acceptance of mistakes as learning experiences, facilitates proactive behaviour via cognitive-motivational states. Getting both confidence and forgiveness from people who cooperate with them, employees will be more confident with their own abilities and are more likely to try things beyond core tasks and expand their roles. Therefore, proactive behaviours such as personal initiative, individual innovation, and taking charge are more likely to be displayed because workers are willing to take risks when they can get support from coworkers.

Proactive dispositions
Bateman and Crant defined proactive personality as the one who is relatively unconstrained by situational forces and who effects environmental change. Proactive people usually take initiatives, recognize opportunities and make things happen rather than passively adapt to the environment. For example, a proactive person may look for the future and get prepared for the opportunity. One the contrary, a reactive person will wait to respond after things happen. They are more willing to adapt to the environment rather than change it.There are a number of studies assessing an array of potential outcomes of proactive behaviour at work. Research has established relationships between proactive personality and individual job performance, career outcomes, leadership, organizational innovation, team performance, and entrepreneurship.

Personal initiative
Personal initiative is a behavioural pattern whereby individuals take an active, self-starting approach to work and go beyond formal job requirements. It is characterised by five components: 1) it is consistent with the organisational mission; 2) it takes a long-term focus; 3) it is action-oriented and goal directed; 4) it is persistent in the face of obstacles; and 5) It is self-starting and proactive. One aspect of personal initiative is proactive.Being proactive means one actively effects environmental changes, specifically speaking, there are several aspects. 1) making a long-term goal and trying to achieve the goal. One example is that a teacher in a university planned to develop an interactive program to make students better understand the lecture. The teacher self-started the plan to go beyond the job’s requirement and thus he had a personal initiative. Since developing the program is a long-term plan, his behaviour is also proactive. 2) Consider potential problem areas and opportunities before they occur. For example, an engineer decided to reconstruct a part of a machine to prevent malfunction. 3) Back-up plans. Plans are made to prevent future risks 4) Have action plans for opportunities ready. These plans made with personal initiative are to grasp future opportunities.5) Develop pre-signals for potential problems and opportunities.

Role breadth self-efficacy
In a narrow ″job description″ sense, one's job is to do the task assigned; in a broad sense, one's job is not only to do the assigned task, but also to carry out the responsibilities of the team, take part in team decision making process, cross train, use one's judgement to contribute to team’s productivity, maintenance and development. Parker introduced the concept of role breadth self-efficacy (RBSE) to capture employees’ perceived capability of carrying out a broader and more proactive set of work tasks that extend beyond prescribed technical requirements. High role breadth self-efficacy individuals tend to have a high confidence to do multiple tasks well. Role breadth self-efficacy is very important for both individual and organisational proactivity since it motivates individuals to go beyond their tasks and take initiative in a broader context. Strauss’s work showed that role-breadth self-efficacy is significantly associated with both team member proactivity and organization member proactivity; Moreover, it is also associated with both team member proficiency and organization member proficiency. However, results suggest that role breadth self-efficacy more strongly associated with proactivity than proficiency.

Taking charge
Morrison and Phelps argued that the proactive component of extra-role behaviour has been under-emphasised. Most extra-role behaviour research put more attention on organisational citizenship behaviour and even trivial behaviours that sustain the status quo. Morrison and Phelps introduced the “taking charge” construct to capture the idea that organisations need employees who are willing to challenge the status quo to bring about constructive change. Taking charge is defined as constructive efforts by employees to effect functional change with respect to how work is executed. At its essence, taking charge is change-oriented and geared toward improvement. Morrison and Phelps also mentioned that the decision to take charge will be affected by two judgments: the assessment of likely success and an assessment of likely consequences.

Self-efficacy motivation
Self-efficacy motivation also refers to "can do " motivation. "Can do" Motivation involves a belief that one has this ability to be proactive and control the situation then produce desired outcomes. In addition, it relates to the concept of self-efficacy ("Can I do this?"). This is because Bandura stated that self-efficacy was effective in increasing individuals willingness to overcome obstacles. Apart from self-efficacy, can do motivation also includes control appraisals. The study reveals that high control appraisals are useful to motivate individuals' sense of responsibility. Also, it is able to encourage individuals do not give up and to actively search for information. Furthermore, the perceived cost of behaviour also belongs to can do motivation. This relates to the question about "How risky is it?" When individual is engaged in the task, such as fear of failure or losing opportunities might influence individual's willingness to engage in proactive scoping. This is because they offer too much in terms of time, money, energy or other resources in achieving the proactive goal and it is costly. On the other hand, "can do" motivation provides individual self-confidence which allows them starting proactive goals and have the courage to cope with potential negative result which produced by this goal.

Internalised motivation
People also call it as "reason to" motivation. "Reason to" is the second important motivation state which provide a compelling reason to encourage proactive behaviour. Self-determination is a useful theory to explain the reason to motivation. This theory showed that proactive behaviour is autonomous rather than regulated by external factors. Also, there are three types of autonomous motivation which are able to drive proactive goal processes. First of all, individuals are willing to be engaged in proactive activities when they perceive the task is interesting and enjoyable. It is called intrinsic motivation. Secondly, individuals will be more likely strive for proactive goal is because it is helpful to fulfil their life goals or express values that are central to them. It is the integrated form of motivation. In addition, the last reason is because they feel the proactive goal they set which visualize future outcome is important and they perceive they have a responsibility to achieve it. This is called identified motivation. Therefore, autonomous motivation provides different reason to individual to seek changes in the future. When tasks or goals are interesting, intrinsic motivation is able to help individual to achieve better performance. On the other hand, identified and integrated motivation provide better outcome when tasks become not interesting but important and necessary.

Activated positive affect
This is also called "energised to" motivation. Energised to motivation is the third motivational state which relates to affect-related. Parker and Wang stated that how individual feel is able to influence them to engage in proactive behaviour. Individual's core affect involves momentary feeling which can be represented by two dimensions: valence and activation. At first, Fredrickson suggested that positive affect expand people's momentary thought-action repertoires such as exploring and creating. Also, positive affect is able to increase the possibility that people create more challenging goals and help individuals deal with problematic future. Furthermore, Warr stated that high activated positive affect, for example, feeling inspired is more important in motivating proactive behaviour rather than low activated positive effects such as feeling calm. This is because a high degree of activation induces people are willing to put more effort into achieving proactive goals.

Proactive goal generation
Goal generation stage involves selecting or changing goal and planning activities to achieve it. Proactive goal generation has two components which are envisioning and planning. Envisioning involves becoming aware of and identifying current or future problems or opportunities, and is able to imagine a different future if the problem is solved or the opportunity is caught. In addition, the next process is planning which is about deciding which action plans can be implemented in order to reach the desired outcomes. The study suggested that individual was able to change themselves to achieve the envisioned future. For example, they can develop their new skills or expand their network. Also, they can change the situation to achieve the desired outcome, such as reviewing their work methods or persuading the boss to change strategic direction.

Proactive goal striving
Proactive goal striving is an important stage which allows individual producing an impact on themselves or the environment. This stage happens after the proactive goal is executed. Bindl and Parker stated that this stage contains two critical processes which are enacting and reflecting. Enacting concerns the overt action individuals engage in achieving their proactive goal. For example, when employees want to improve a process, enacting action is possible involves searching information which describe disadvantages of current methods, and also persuading and affecting colleagues by telling them advantages of the change. It is important to have self-regulation when enacting proactive goals. This is because self-regulation is able to induce individual become more concentrate on tasks. Also, it can help individual manage negative emotions effectively from people or environment and be prepared to face the unexpected challenge. On the other hand, reflecting a focus on investing time and efforts to evaluate the failure, success and consequences of individual's proactive behaviour. Proactivity focuses on creating something new which lead to uncertain and ambiguous easily. Therefore, these efforts are the best resources to help individual to change their proactive goal or modify their processes in achieving this goal.

= Consequence =

Individual job performance
Improvement in individual performance was firstly related to proactive personality by Crant in 1995. Further investigation provides more empirical evidence to support the positive effect of proactive behaviour on the performance of salesman: more proactive staffs can achieve better sales outputs. Proactive behaviour was supposed to increase intrinsic motivation, task confidence and risk avoidance which would be helpful in influencing their working environments and promoting changes. For example, this behaviour could be transferred to more effective buyer-seller relationships establishment, better customer satisfaction and more insightful market investigation by salesmen. Implementation of employee's own suggestions and good input may also develop both their working initiative and their individual performance. And goal orientation can facilitate their learning and achievement as well as inhibit their risk-taking potential.

Career outcomes
Career success can be regarded as a complex result lead by several kind of factors such as internal personality, external environment, and cumulative behaviours or achievements. Proactivity had been demonstrated to have a positive relation to some abilities such as innovation, leadership, and political knowledge. Similar research also shows that proactive behaviour increase job involvement. As the career success is tightly combined with individual performance, those who possess outstanding ability and involvement are destined to achieve more approve and return in their career. Empirical data also support this idea. When other relevant factors are taken out of consideration, research shows that more proactive behaviour happened in workplace indicate more career success. More importantly, this feature is witnessed from both objective and subjective sides: those proactive staffs got high score in rating system, receive higher salary and more promotion, are regarded as more productive by their seniors, and they themselves are more satisfied with their situation. This result may also due to the fact that proactive behaviour such as career initiative, network establishment among the organization and focused problem-solving are necessary for getting better career outcome in any working environment. And as proactive behaviour are focused mainly on personal career achievements, proactive people pursue career success, too.

Leadership
Proactive people are perceived as more likely to be transformational leaders who maintain a clear mission, inspire followers, foster change and get through obstacles with great determination. Research showed that high self-monitors, likely to be younger and male, were more involved in their positions, and present a higher level of intention and capability to perform as a leader. They can also endure more working pressure and show more ambition than low self-monitors. The proactive behaviour aimed to generate leadership such as pursue leader roles or provide help to colleagues are also necessary in establishing a network helpful in leading people.

Also, proactive managers are regarded to gain greater charisma in working places. Charismatic leaders can create a more attractive vision cast and a more influential impression on followers. They often generate more acceptance from both employees and senior managers and are consider to be sign of high performance. A survey focus on American Presidents also show similar results: those who rate higher in proactivity get higher scores in charisma criteria. And the survey also indicates that charismatic leadership facilitate people′s effectiveness to persuade others and pursue their targets, especially for senior leaders such as presidents.

Entrepreneurship
The result of a research done by Crant in 1996 showed that proactive MBA students gained more intention to own a business by themselves in the future. Another study also showed that proactivity was related with entrepreneurial behaviours. Theoretically, proactive people concentrate more on personal achievement and they pursue more challengeable experiences, so they are more likely to get involved in radical actions such as starting or purchasing a business and run it with their personal ideas or strategies. They also adapt quicker to new ideas, show more openness to fresh technologies which are both cradle for revolutionary business.

Innovation
Parker stated that a previous research concerning about many management initiatives of a glass manufacturing firm had indicated that there was strong connection between proactive personality and organizational innovations. By using communication briefing, individuals who are proactive usually more likely intend to share strategic information and dig underlying information which could contribute to innovative decision making and have belief in that they are doing promised job, continuous improving the whole groups. This kind of innovation ability is beneficial to both employees and supervisors. This can be explained by some research which shows that companies gain huge useful information and new ideas from these proactive employees while employees who often offer innovation suggestion and display career initiative are taken more advantages by employers and get more chance to promote or gain higher remuneration. Additionally, people who have more tendency to behaviour proactively have relative higher possibility to display creative reaction when facing increased pressure or suffering from dilemma. This mean the innovation generated from proactivity not only contributes to company development but also enhance personal improvement because it can lead people promote self-direction.

Decrease working stress
In the background that competition is more and more fierce, any organization and job would generate job stress which is regarded as the first level organizational outcome.Job stress is a kind of feeling that makes employees uncomfortable and anxious. Maslach mentioned that work engagement is crucial to address work stress issues because it can enhance work persistence and give employees affective and positive motivation. So proactive behaviours makes significant and essential contribution to favourable work engagement because they are associated with each other internally as it is defined by Crant that proactive behaviour help people improve current environment or create new ones in initiative way; usually people with proactivity likes to question the status quo instead of adapting to circumstances passively. Proactive behaviour leads people work in an active approach and give them big horizon of career to improve approach to work as well as self-developing skills to meet the harsh demands and requirement of future challenge, enhancing the probability to grasp opportunity successfully. It consists of personal initiative, taking charge, flexible role orientations which are different but internal-connected behaviours. Also active search for learning chance and engagement in study are classified as proactive behaviour because these meet discretionary which can be defined as a nature feature of proactive behaviour. All of these behaviour enhance the work engagement, releasing employee from occupational stress in some degree.

Moderate interpersonal conflicts
Interpersonal conflicts in workplaces may decrease job satisfaction, individual performance and increase possibility of mood problems. Recent research witnessed that people with higher proactivity level would achieve higher performance and job satisfaction than lower ones under a static comparable low conflict level. This finding showed that proactive personality could buffer the negative effect of interpersonal conflicts due to its success in mending stress problems among staffs. However, research also showed that proactive staffs might suffer more negative effect of additional conflicts than their counterparts: when conflict level increases, high proactivity may lead to a significant decrease in measurements such as performance, while low proactivity people make no differences. Although proactive behaviour can moderate interpersonal conflicts, its complex mechanism needs further study to map.

Enhance organisation socialisation
It is necessary for freshers to gather enough information such as attitudes, common value and requirement of their new organisation in order to become an efficient staff sooner in this environment. This process is defined as organisational socialisation (OS) which has been demonstrated to be vital for the participation and adaption of newcomers. Recent research showed that proactive behaviour had a positive relationship with two identified influential factors: self-efficacy from individual perspective and institutional socialisation tactics from organisational perspective. It plays as a mediator of those two factors and contributes to the final effective socialisation outcomes. Although it is not the only operation method to gain good results and it might even offset the positive impact of structured tactics, the existence of newcomer proactive behaviour still acts as an indicator for better newcomer's socialisation outcome such as self-adaption, self-adjustment and relationship development.

Incompatibility with leader
Sometimes people probably get in troubles due to their proactive behaviours. A proactive individual who is fond to show his or her ideas or to express opinions with work colleagues may struggle when job environment is not receptive enough to employee proactivity. Some studies show that when the leadership is extroverted, the team usually performs poorer if employees are proactive than the team with passive employees. This may be explained by that extroverted managers usually wish to be the focus in the team and seek central attention while he may treat proactive behaviours as threaten, which pushing proactive employees into unfavourable situation.

= Related concept: proactive behaviours vs reactive behaviours = The difference between these two behaviours has been addressed in two specific areas;
 * 1) Proactive vs reactive stress coping style- Studies conducted by Koolhaasa et.al (1991) identified the existence of proactive and reactive stress coping style. "Evidence is accumulating that the two coping    styles might explain a differential vulnerability to stress mediated disease due to the differential adaptive value of the two coping styles and the accompanying neuroendocrine differentiation".
 * 2) Proactive vs reactive aggression- Dodge (1991) presented prototypes of two school-aged boys, Billy and Reid, who shared the feature of being aggressive but were aggressive in different ways. Billy was "a bully among peers" and "a major behaviour problem in school." Reid, however, was "volatile and short-tempered," he "reacted angrily to minor provocations,"and he "didn't seem to start fights as much as he escalates them." Billy was proactively aggressive and he was likely to “trouble to others", while Reid was reactively aggressive and was more or less "troubled by others".  Salmivalli and Nieminen (2002) found the connection between bullying roles and reactive and proactive aggression levels. Bully-victims were highly aggressive both reactively and proactively. Bullies were significantly less aggressive than bully-victims but scored higher than victims in both reactive and proactive aggression levels.

= See also =

= Reference List =