Although it is generally assumed and widely acknowledged that individuals with high proactive personality can contribute substantially to the organization, scholars have begun to cast doubt on its exclusive positivity. This main theme of this dissertation is to examine the double-edged sword effect (i.e., both bright side and dark side) of proactive personality in the workplace. Throughout the three essays, I adopted different theoretical frameworks to explore how proactive personality, as an “initiative paradox”, leads to undesirable outcomes above and beyond the prevailing bright-side effects that have been well documented in the current literature.

In the first essay, I investigated how the supervisor responds to the employee’s proactive personality. Adopting social self-preservatio...[ Read more ]

Although it is generally assumed and widely acknowledged that individuals with high proactive personality can contribute substantially to the organization, scholars have begun to cast doubt on its exclusive positivity. This main theme of this dissertation is to examine the double-edged sword effect (i.e., both bright side and dark side) of proactive personality in the workplace. Throughout the three essays, I adopted different theoretical frameworks to explore how proactive personality, as an “initiative paradox”, leads to undesirable outcomes above and beyond the prevailing bright-side effects that have been well documented in the current literature.

In the first essay, I investigated how the supervisor responds to the employee’s proactive personality. Adopting social self-preservation perspective, I proposed that the employee’s proactive personality triggers his/her supervisor’s feeling of status threat, which further leads to the supervisor’s low evaluation of the focal employee’s task performance. Employee’s motives (i.e., impression management motive, prosocial value motive, and organizational concern motive) and supervisor’s motives (i.e., dominance motive and prestige motive) were considered as contingent factors in the relationship between proactive personality and supervisor’s feeling of status threat. Using the three-wave multisource data collected from five hospitals, I found that proactive personality has no relationship with supervisor’s feeling of status threat; supervisor’s feeling of status threat decreases employee’s task performance evaluation. The relationship between proactive personality and supervisor’s feeling of status threat was positive (vs. negative) when the subordinate’s impression management motive is low (vs. high) or prosocial value motive is high (vs. low), and when the supervisor’s dominance motive is high or prestige motive is low (vs. high).

In the second essay, going beyond individual level inquiry, I probed into team level proactive personality. Drawing on dominance complementarity theory and introducing team personality composition, I proposed that the team mean and dispersion of proactive personality interact in predicting team voice through task conflict and relationship conflict. Servant leadership was considered as a moderator in this relationship. With multi-source and multi-wave data collected from different industries (health care industry and construction companies) in the two-study research design, I found that under low dispersion of team proactive personality, the average level of team proactive personality was negatively related to team voice through task conflict and relationship conflict. The three-way interaction among the average level and dispersion of proactive personality and servant leadership in predicting task conflict and relationship conflict were supported in both studies.

The third essay focuses on the role of team’s maximal level of proactive personality, examining how teammates as a whole respond to the team member who has the highest proactive personality (i.e., maximal level of proactive personality). Drawing upon social exchange perspective, trust theory, and relative deprivation theory, this paper predicted that teammates have two different ways of response to the top proactive member: showing trust to top proactive member or feeling relatively deprived of their common resources (e.g., leaders’ support, rewards, recognition, and so on), and accordingly, withholding or exhibiting hostility (e.g., ostracism) toward the focal member. This research further proposed that relative leader-member exchange (RLMX) as a moderator strengthens the positive effects of the maximal level of proactive personality on peers’ trust and feeling of relative deprivation. Analyses based on the three-wave data (including 966 nurses nested in 160 nursing teams) collected from health care industry supported all hypotheses.

In all, findings in these three essays contribute to theory and practice of proactive personality by elucidating its double-edged sword effects—identifying multiple mechanisms (i.e., mediators) and contingent factors (i.e., moderators) to investigate its relationships with in-role performance (i.e., task performance evaluation), extra-role performance (i.e., team voice), and social outcomes (i.e., ostracism) at the individual level and team level. Highlighting the potentially negative effect above and beyond the positive effect of proactive personality as previously demonstrated, this research paints a more complete picture and provides scholars as well as practitioners a fine-grained understanding of the role of proactive personality in the workplace.

Keywords: proactive personality; status threat; servant leadership; team conflicts; team voice; trust; relative deprivation; workplace ostracism