Are proactive personalities always beneficial? Political skill as a moderator.

Abstract

Does proactive personality always enhance job success? The authors of this study draw on socioanalytic theory of personality and organizational political perspectives to study employees' political skill in moderating the effects of proactive personality on supervisory ratings of employee task performance, helping behaviors, and learning behaviors. Multisource data from 225 subordinates and their 75 immediate supervisors reveal that proactive personality is associated negatively with supervisory evaluations when political skill is low, and the negative relationship disappears when political skill is high. Implications and future research directions are discussed.

Contextualizing leaders' interpretations of proactive followership

“…The context‐specificity of followership tended to revolve around proactive follower behaviors, which entailed unsolicited advice or input from followers. Consistent with these findings, previous work has shown that both political skill (Sun & van Emmerik, ) and an ability to gauge the current situation (Chan, ) moderate the relationship between proactivity and supervisor performance evaluations. Although proactive behavior is a way for followers to influence the leadership process (Carsten et al, ; Oc et al, ), the potential rewards of proactive followership are not without risk (Grant & Ashford, ).…”

How does proactive personality promote creativity? A multilevel examination of the interplay between formal and informal leadership

“…In addition, managers should identify and pay attention to proactive employees and informal leaders, as they may benefit more from visionary guidance than other employees. Although research has suggested that formal leaders may sometimes see proactive subordinates as distracting and threatening (Crant, ; Frese & Fay, ; Grant, Gino, & Hofmann, ; Sun & Van Emmerik, ), our findings suggest that a positive interpersonal interaction (i.e., visionary guidance) can be beneficial in practice.…”

“…A proactive personality, defined as a stable disposition to take personal initiative in a broad range of activities and situations (Seibert, Kraimer, & Crant, ), drives specific proactive behaviours under various circumstances (e.g., newcomers’ proactive socialization; Miller & Jablin, ) and enhances one's overall proactivity (Crant, ). Thus, proactive individuals are relatively unconstrained by environmental forces and are likely to actively influence their environments and initiate changes that challenge the status quo (Crant, ; Parker, Bindl, & Strauss, ; Sun & Van Emmerik, ). Therefore, proactive personality has been considered important for creativity‐ and career‐related outcomes (e.g., Seibert, Crant, & Kraimer, ; Seibert et al ., ), which have been demonstrated empirically in prior studies (e.g., Kim, Hon, & Crant, ; Kim, Hon, & Lee, ; Seibert et al ., ).…”

Political skill and organizational identification: Preventing role ambiguity from hindering organizational citizenship behaviour

“…Conversely, employees without adequate political skills may have more difficulty leveraging positive emotions about their organization to protect against the hardship of resource-draining role ambiguity because they have less easy access to valuable knowledge resources that their organizational colleagues might possess in terms of how to combine their regular job tasks with voluntary work activities (Ferris, Davidson, & Perrewé, 2005;Sun & van Emmerik, 2015). In this case, the buffering effect of the personal resource of organizational identification on the negative relationship between role ambiguity and OCB should have less incremental importance (Hobfoll, 2001).…”