Proactive Personality Within Social and Task Contexts

Abstract

In this dissertation, I intend to advance our understanding of the mediating and moderating factors of proactive personality effects along the person-situation interaction perspective through conducting two field studies. The first study examines the associations between proactive personality and employee helping behavior and task performance, and considering the possible roles of employees? exchange relationships with supervisors and coworkers in the associations. Moderated mediation analyses showed that the mediating role of exchange relationship quality worked more for less proactive, reactive employees than more proactive employees. The second study attempted to replicate the first study?s findings with job autonomy as the situation factor, and learning behavior and job performance as the focal outcomes. Results were only partially consistent with the hypothesized conceptual model. The two studies advance understanding of proactive personality along an interactionist perspective. Research implications and future research directions are discussed.