The relationship between creative behavior and proactive personality:An empirical research by an approach-avoidance framework theory
Proactive personality represents a dispositional tendency to take initiative and bring about positive change in an organization.While such proactive behavior is seen to be beneficial to the organization,researches on proactivity omitted the potential risks yielding by proactive behavior.Especially for creative behavior,which is performed proactively by the employees to resolve the problem and promote the work with creative ideas,why are the proactive employees still willing to perform creative behavior if they may face potential risks with unsuccessful innovation?To fill this research gap,we put forward an Approach-Avoidance Framework theory to illustrate how approach-oriented and avoidance-oriented proactive personalities would differently lead to approach-oriented and avoidance-oriented creative behaviors through opportunity and problem detecting motivations.Furthermore,we also discussed how team empowerment climate and intergroup competition climate differently strengthen the effects of proactive personalities on creative behaviors.To test our approach-avoidance framework of proactivity,we collected data from six companies sited in Guangdong,China.Initially,two hundred teams with three subordinates in each team were randomly selected to participate in our research.To reduce common method variance,subordinates'proactive personality,motivations and control variables,as well as team empowerment climate and intergroup competition climate were collected at three-time points,with approximately one month separating each survey occasion.Finally,subordinates'creative behaviors were rated by their direct supervisors.Two new approach/avoidance-based measures were developed here to assess subordinate's proactive personality and creative behavior.After deleting the unqualified data,489 subordinates of 163 teams were remained in our final sample with an 81.5％response rate.Participants(47.6％female)were on average 27 years old and had worked in their teams for approximately 1.74 years with average of 5.85 years of work tenure.91％of them had a college degree or above.Due to the multilevel nature of our data,we adopted a multilevel structural equation modeling(ML-SEM)framework to test our hypotheses by Mplus 7.4.To assess the significance of the indirect and moderated indirect effects,we used bootstrapping procedures,resampling 2,000 times and using the bias corrected percentile method to create 99％and 95％confidence intervals by R Programming Language.The results supported all our hypothesis.More specific,subordinate's approach-oriented proactive personality positively predicted approach-oriented creative behavior through opportunity detecting motivation,while avoidance-oriented proactive personality positively predicted avoidance-oriented creative behavior through problem detecting motivation.However,the approach-oriented proactive personality cannot significantly predict avoidance-oriented creative behavior and avoidance-oriented proactive personality cannot significantly predict approach-oriented creative behavior.Moreover,team empowerment climate positively moderated the indirect effect of opportunity detecting motivation on the relationship between approach-oriented proactive personality and approach-oriented creative behavior,while intergroup competition climate positively moderated the indirect effect of problem detecting motivation on the relationship between avoidance-oriented proactive personality and avoidance-oriented creative behavior.No other significant moderating effect was found.These results support our arguments that the approach and avoidance natures of proactive personality can be distinguished from each other to generate different proactive behaviors,and the approach-oriented and avoidance-oriented characteristics of organization contexts were responsible for stimulating corresponding approach or avoidance process of proactivity.By verifying such approach-avoidance framework for employee's proactivity,we respond to an important research question how approach-oriented or avoidance-oriented proactive personality differently elicits employee's different proactive behaviors,yielding significant theoretical and practical contributions and implications for proactivity research.Firstly,we provided an approach-avoidance framework to understanding the new characteristics of proactive personality and creative behavior,providing two new measures to proactivity research.Secondly,we addressed the threat aspect of proactive behavior,which was neglected by previous researches,by providing an approach-avoidance mechanism to distinguish the different effects of proactive personality on creative behaviors.Our new framework is thus helpful to resolve the inconsistent findings in proactivity research.Moreover,we also investigated the moderating effects of organization contexts,extending proactivity research to team and organization level.We thus contribute to providing a more holistic framework to proactivity study,which can help the manager to enhance the effectiveness of managerial interventions.
万方数据
维普
