Fostering employees' proactive strategic engagement: Individual and contextual antecedents

• Author: Isabell M. Welpe,Matthias Spörrle,Andranik Tumasjan,Maria Strobel
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12134
• Date: 01 January 2017
• Published date: 01 January 2017

Fostering employees’proactive strategic

engagement: Individual and contextual

antecedents

Maria Strobel*,Technical Universityof Munich and BavarianState Institute for Higher

Education Research and Planning, Germany

Andranik Tumasjan*, Technical University of Munich, Germany

MatthiasSpörrle, Privatuniversität Schloss Seeburg, Seekirchen am Wallersee, Germany

Isabell M. Welpe, Technical University of Munich and Bavarian State Institute for

Higher Education Research and Planning, Germany

Human Resource Management Journal, Vol 27, no 1, 2017,pages 113–132

Proactive strategic scanning is an important aspect of employee proactivity and contributes to engaging

employees in the organisation-wide strategy process. It also contributes to strategic renewal and innovation

by helping to identify potential strategic opportunities and threats. However, little is known about its

antecedents and how HRM may support this valuable resource. To address this gap, we develop and test a

model of individual and contextual antecedents of proactive strategic scanning. We hypothesise and find a

positive effect of future-focused personality on strategic scanning which is mediated by promotion-focused

self-regulation at work. Moreover, we investigate how work design functions as a contextual boundary

condition of this mediated effect. The effect is strengthened under high social support but is not influenced

by the level of decision-making autonomy. Our findings point to specific variables which can be targeted by

HRM to enhance employees’strategic engagement and innovativebehaviour.

Contact: Maria Strobel, Technical University of Munich, TUM School of Management, Germany.

Email: maria.strobel@tum.de

Keywords: strategic engagement; employee involvement in strategy; discretionary behaviour;

proactive behaviour; innovation; innovative behaviour

INTRODUCTION

Proactive strategic scanning pertains to ‘proactively surveying the organization’s

environment to identify ways to ensure a fit between the organization and its

environment, such as identifying ways the organization might respond to emerging

markets or actively searching the environment for future organizational threats and

opportunities’(Parker and Collins, 2010: 637). Thus, proactive strategic scanning is a

discretionary work behaviour that has the potential to ultimately affect an organisation’s

strategy through its contribution to an organisation-wide strategy-making process (Parker

and Collins, 2010). Given the current rapid and disruptive evolution in product-market

domains, involving a broad base of employees in strategy-making through strategic scanning

becomes increasingly important (Merchant, 2010). For example, the German publishing

company Haufe, which transitioned from a traditional print publisher to a provider of digital

education products and consulting, attributes its success to its (lower-level) employees who

* The first two authors contributed equally to this study.

HUMAN RESOURCEMANAGEMENT JOURNAL, VOL27, NO 1, 2017 113

©2017 John Wiley& Sons Ltd

Pleasecite this articlein press as: Strobel,M., Tumasjan, A., Spörrle,M. and Welpe, I.M.(2017) ‘Fosteringemployees’proactivestrategic engagement:

Individualand contextualantecedents’.HumanResource ManagementJournal 27:1,113–132

doi: 10.1111/1748-8583.12134

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are close to customers and marketsand therefore able to quickly detectenvironmental changes

(Haufe, 2014).

A considerable body of research documents the importance of such bottom-up strategic

activities and their contribution to firm performance, especially in dynamic environments

(e.g. Hart and Banbury, 1994; Floyd and Lane, 2000; Andersen, 2004; Andersen and Nielsen,

2009). Research shows that strategic scanning behaviour generates several beneficial firm

outcomes, such as increased championing of innovations (Howell and Shea, 2001; Wu et al.,

2013) and higher levels of firm performance(Miller and Lee, 2001). Based on a resource-based

view (RBV) perspective (Barney, 1991; Boxall, 1996), firms can build a valuable resource that

may give them a competitive advantage by systematically fostering strategy processes

throughout the organisation. This reasoning is in line with Boxall (1996: 66), who –referring

to Hart and Banbury’s(1994)seminalwork–concludes tha t ‘[n]ot only those firms with

astute leadership at the top but those that can combine this strength with deep employee

involvement in strategic decision-making appear to be more effective’.

However,despite the relevanceof strategic scanning,little is known about its individualand

contextual antecedents in organisations, specifically regarding how this valuable type of

behaviour can be fostered among all employees rather than involving only top managers or

specialised organisational units (Stieger et al., 2012). Our study focuses on the potential of

organisational members to contribute to strategy by engaging in proactive strategic scanning,

adding value to HRM and strategy frameworks (e.g. Jiang et al., 2012; Ployhart and Hale,

2014) in the following three ways.

First, we contribute to the HRM literature on fostering employees’strategic engagement

(Boswell, 2006; Buller and McEvoy, 2012) by investigating the behavioural mechanisms and

boundary conditions that give rise to proactive strategic scanning behaviour (Parker and

Collins,2010). We concentrateon white-collarworkers in knowledge-intensivecontexts because

for such workers (rather than blue-collar workers) engaging in the strategic process may be

considered especially relevant. Building on the organisational behaviour literature on

proactivity (Parker and Collins, 2010) and on the micro-foundations of strategy perspective

(Coff and Kryscynski, 2011; Ployhart and Hale, 2014), our research adds to the understanding

of buildingup employee engagementin strategy as a firm’sstrategicresource.Wethusrespond

to callsfor investigatingthe micro-foundations of an organisation-widestrategy process(Stieger

et al., 2012; Barney and Felin, 2013). Specifically, weenrich the literature by testing a model that

combines dispositional, motivational and contextual components (based on the ability-

motivation-opportunity framework; Boxall and Purcell, 2011) and by demonstrating how these

components coalesce in giving rise to strategically valuable discretionary employee behaviour.

Second, we contribute to laying the groundwork for designing and investigating

strategically targeted HR systems (Jackson et al., 2014; Jiang et al., 2015) which focus on

enhancing strategic engagement and innovative behaviour. Providing evidence on the

relationships between constructs that can be targeted by specific HR policies and practices,

our research informsstudies aiming at forming coherent HR systemsthat can realise synergies

based on the interrelationships betweenunderlying behaviouralmechanisms (Chadwick,2010;

Jiang et al., 2012).

Third, we contribute to the emerging stream of research on proactive strategic behaviour

(Parker and Collins, 2010) by empirically investigating the joint dispositional, motivational

and contextual antecedents of this specific proactivity dimension. In doing so, we connect to

theoretical conceptualisations of the antecedents of proactive behaviour (Parker et al., 2010)

and research on regulatory focus as a motivational mediator between dispositions and

behavioural outcomes(Lanaj et al., 2012).

Future focusand strategic scanning

114 HUMANRESOURCE MANAGEMENT JOURNAL,VOL 27, NO 1, 2017

©2017 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.