The relationship between proactive personality, empowerment and proactive work behavior

Organizations often seek out action oriented employees as a source of competitive advantage. Proactive personality has emerged as the personality trait associated with employee tendency to take charge and demonstrate initiative. There is, however, a widespread belief among Turkish managers that their employees are not proactive. An important construct identified as having an impact on proactive personality is empowerment. Proactive personality and empowerment have emerged as important concepts thought to explain proactive work behaviors. Despite the conceptual and theoretical overlap between these concepts, there have been very few efforts to integrate them to determine their relative influence or relationship to each other. This study examined the role of empowerment on the relationship between proactive personality and proactive work behaviors within the context of work design theories. Hypotheses were formulated according to assumptions stemming from research reviewed in the literature. They include: (1) that structural empowerment will partially mediate the relationship between proactive personality and proactive work behaviors; (2) that psychological empowerment will partially mediate the relationship between proactive personality and proactive work behaviors; (3) that psychological empowerment will partially mediate the relationship between structural empowerment and proactive work behaviors; and (4) that there is a strong association between structural and psychological empowerment. A cross-sectional survey design was used to survey 323 ranked employees of multiple different work organizations in Istanbul. Four established measures were used to measure the variables. They include a Proactive Personality Scale (PPS) to measure proactive personality, the Conditions of work Empowerment Questionnaire-II (CWEQ-II) to measure structural empowerment and the Psychological Empowerment Scale to measure psychological empowerment. A Proactive Work Behaviors (PWB) scale was developed to measure the dependent variable proactive work behaviors. To provide evidence of construct validity and refine the dimensionality of the measurement instruments, an exploratory factor analysis was conducted. Internal consistency for each level of the scales were examined using Chronbach's Alpha. The Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 20 for Windows was used to to carry out the statistical analysis of the data. One-way (ANOVA) and T-tests were used to determine if the groups were significantly different in their means. The relationship between the dependent and independent variables, were tested with Pearson correlation and multiple regression analyses. Hypotheses were tested using Baron and Kenny's (1986) framework for mediation. All four hypotheses were supported. Other findings include the fact that the employees in this study revealed a high level of proactive personality but this did not strongly predict proactive work behaviors. There was no evidence that proactive personality was able to compensate for lower levels of empowerment in predicting organizational outcomes but there was evidence that both structural and psychological empowerment were able to compensate for lower levels of proactive personality.