New directions for exploring the consequences of proactive behaviors: Introduction to the special issue

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2334
• Published date: 01 January 2019
• Author: Wu Liu,Sharon K. Parker,Subrahmaniam Tangirala,Cynthia Lee
• Date: 01 January 2019

EDITORIAL

New directions for exploring the consequences of proactive

behaviors: Introduction to the special issue

Summary

This special issue introduces new directions for exploring the

consequences of proactive behaviors. The authors summarize

the new scopes of consequences, new social contexts, and

new methods in this exploration. They also identify several

limitations of the existing literature and call for more future

research in this stream.

1|INTRODUCTION

Employees are expected to be proactive in this age where flatter

organizational structures, rapid changes in customer demands, and

empowerment practices are prevalent. Proactive behaviors are

those that are self‐initiated, future‐oriented, and change‐oriented

(e.g., Grant & Ashford, 2008). They have been studied under labels

such as voice, proactivity, taking charge, personal initiative, feedback

seeking, or issue selling (Parker & Collins, 2010). Research has

provided valuable insights on the antecedents of these behaviors.

Underpinning this focus on antecedents is an assumption that proac-

tive behaviors are beneficial to individuals, teams, or organizations.

Although there is evidence that these proactive behaviors

enhance individual performance (e.g., Chamberlin, Newton, & Lepine,

2017), as well as team performance (e.g., Detert, Burris, Harrison, &

Martin, 2013), many important questions remain about their conse-

quences. To begin with, only a narrow set of outcomes of proactive

behaviors have been explored. For instance, there is little research

on how enactment of those behaviors impacts health or well‐being

of individuals. Do proactive behaviors increase burnout or stress that

comes with attempts at changing the work context? Or, does the

sense of agency that employees experience from being proactive

increase their sense of well‐being?

Additionally, there has been limited research on how the out-

comes of proactive behaviors are impacted by the work context in

which they are enacted. It is likely that the context can mitigate or

facilitate positive outcomes for employees behaving proactively. At

the same time, proactive employees do not merely respond to their

circumstances but seek to change their context to make it more

receptive to proactivity. Hence, there is a need for research that

examines how the context affects the success of proactive behaviors,

as well as how proactive behaviors enable changes in such context.

To address such questions, a multilevel perspective that examines

the phenomenon in a both bottom‐up and top‐down manner is

essential.

Furthermore, research has paid limited attention to examining

how proactive behaviors function differently in distinct cultures

(Morrison, 2014) and how “time”impacts proactivity at work. Scholars

have noted that, “proactive behaviors are not isolated incidents that

occur at one point in time. Rather, they are informed, cultivated, and

constrained by past experiences, successes, and setbacks”(Grant &

Ashford, 2008). To enrich our understanding of the consequences of

proactive behaviors, we need to examine proactive behaviors in

different cultural contexts and consider temporal issues.

The goal of this special issue is to deepen our understanding of

the consequences of proactive behaviors by expanding the scope of

outcomes, integrating them with work contexts, and adopting new

methodologies. We are excited to present seven articles that cover a

wide range of the consequences of proactive behaviors, including

employee daily work outcomes (Cangiano, Parker, & Yeo, 2019), per-

sonal initiative training outcomes for entrepreneurs (Mensmann &

Frese, 2019), social status (Weiss & Morrison, 2019), affective and

well‐being consequences (Zacher, Schmitt, Jimmieson, & Rudolph,

2019), career success (Smale et al., 2019), and team innovation

(Guzman & Espejo, 2019; Liang, 2019). Many of these studies have

seriously considered social contexts at different levels, including the

intra‐individual level (Cangiano et al., 2019), the team level (Guzman

& Espejo, 2019; Liang, 2019), and the national cultural level (Smale

et al., 2019). These studies also collectively cover a diverse range of

research designs, such as a longitudinal survey (Zacher et al., 2019),

experience sampling methodology (Cangiano et al., 2019), laboratory

experiments (Weiss & Morrison, 2019), and field experiments

(Mensmann & Frese, 2019), as well as the application of relatively

new analytical methods in this field, such as latent change score

modeling (Zacher et al., 2019).

2|ARTICLES

Weiss and Morrison (2019) extend the voice literature by looking at

whether and why voice might result in social status. Previous research

has often suggested that social status can enhance voice, yet it has

neglected the potential for reverse causality—that voice might lead to

social status. Based on status attainment theory and social judgment

perspective, the authors argue that employees who engage in voice

Received: 12 October 2018 Accepted: 13 October 2018

DOI: 10.1002/job.2334

J Organ Behav. 2019;40:1–4. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job 1