Do calling-oriented employees take charge in organizations? The role of supervisor close monitoring, intrinsic motivation, and organizational commitment

Abstract

Despite a surge in the research on callings, the field of callings requires a better understanding of the workplace implications of callings for employee outcomes. In particular, one important question remains open as to whether calling-oriented employees are willing to engage in proactive, taking charge behaviors to initiate desirable changes in the workplace. Addressing this question is of great importance, as taking charge behaviors are essential to incorporate organizational effectiveness into the current rapidly changing business environment. To explore this question, we draw on a novel theoretical lens of the proactive motivation framework to explicate the functioning of employee calling in that space. Specifically, we propose callings as a distal antecedent of taking charge, while theorizing intrinsic motivation and affective organizational commitment as two distinct motivation bases that link callings to taking charge. Further, we examine supervisor close monitoring as a crucial contingency of these relationships. Our analyses of time-lagged survey data from 188 supervisor-employee dyads revealed that intrinsic motivation and affective commitment connect the relationship between callings and taking charge with a comparable magnitude. Interestingly, our analysis demonstrated that close monitoring weakens the calling-intrinsic motivation relationship but not the calling-affective commitment relationship. Our study deepens the current understanding of the workplace implications of callings by suggesting that calling-oriented employees can serve as proactive change agents in the workplace and by suggesting that, despite being self-directed, their motivation and behaviors are still vulnerable to adverse supervisory influence.