Are We Proactive? Supporting Proactivity in the Shop Floor by Developing a Shared Mental Model

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All continuous improvement initiatives ultimately rely on employees’ proactivity, yet the operational excellence literature rarely addresses it. In this study, we adopt a multilevel framework to investigate the effects of shared mental models on individuals’ proactivity and team proactive performance. Drawing on the organizational behavior, applied psychology, and shared cognition literature, we distinguish between proactivity at the individual level and at the aggregate level to explain how individual efforts should be coordinated to support team operating performance. We suggest that shared understandings of the task and team functioning represent an important antecedent for encouraging self-starting behaviors and achieving coordination between teammates. We employ multilevel path analyses with empirical Bayesian predictions to test our theoretical model using survey data gathered from 266 shop floor employees in 48 teams. Our findings indicate that the extent to which individuals share their task- and team-related mental models affects team members’ propensity to adopt a proactive approach at work (individual proactivity) and to coordinate their efforts with those of teammates (team proactivity) to leverage team operating effectiveness. This study expands the understanding of the antecedents of both individual and team proactivity and sheds light on the impact of aggregated individual behaviors on team outcomes.