Abstract
Research has recently started to examine relationships between proactive behavior and employee well-being. Investigating these relationships is important to understand the effects of proactive behavior at work, and whether proactive behavior leads to an increase or a decrease in well-being. In this daily-diary study, we investigated effects of proactive behavior on within-day changes in four indicators of occupational well-being (i.e., activated positive and negative affect, emotional work engagement and fatigue). Moreover, based on the meta-concept of wise proactivity, which suggests that proactive behavior may lead to either favorable or unfavorable consequences depending on certain boundary conditions, we examined organizational tenure and emotion regulation skills as moderators of these effects. In total, N = 71 employees participated in a daily-diary study with two measurements per day for ten consecutive working days. Results showed that emotion regulation skills interacted with proactive behavior to predict within-day changes in emotional work fatigue, such that the effect of proactive behavior on emotional work fatigue was only positive for employees with low (vs. high) emotion regulation skills. Supplementary analyses examining reverse effects of occupational well-being on proactive behavior showed that organizational tenure interacted with activated positive and negative affect in predicting within-day changes in proactive behavior. For employees with lower (vs. higher) organizational tenure, both activated positive and negative affect were negatively associated with proactive behavior. Overall, our findings contribute to the growing body of research on proactive behavior and well-being by demonstrating reciprocal and conditional day-level relationships among these variables.
Highlights
Research has recently started to examine relationships between proactive behavior and employee well-being
We focus on withinperson relationships and investigate whether these two between-person moderators influence the direction and strength of effects of proactive behavior during the first half of the workday on withinday changes in positive or negative well-being between midday and late afternoon
Given that we hypothesize conditional effects of proactive behavior on wellbeing outcomes, and that higher-order interaction terms are present in these models, the results reported here regarding main effects should be interpreted with some caution
Summary
Research has recently started to examine relationships between proactive behavior and employee well-being. In their review of moderating factors that may strengthen the effects of proactive behavior on favorable outcomes, Parker et al (2019) identify contextual knowledge (e.g. regarding the work environment), person-organization fit, and emotion regulation skills as crucial Based on these theoretical considerations, we investigate organizational tenure and emotion regulation skills as potential moderators of the effects of proactive behavior on within-day changes in occupational well-being outcomes in our study. We propose that intraindividual differences in organizational tenure and emotion regulation skills moderate the effects of proactive behavior on within-day changes in well-being outcomes
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