How do Proactive Leaders Facilitate Followers’ Job Crafting? Testing a Dual-process Model

Abstract

Despite substantial progress made in the job crafting literature, there is still limited knowledge about how leader personality traits influence employees’ job crafting. In this study, we examined a dual-process model of leader proactive personality and follower job crafting. Specifically, we proposed that leader proactive personality is associated with follower job crafting via leader job crafting (a modeling process) and leader empowering behaviors (an empowering process). Moreover, drawing upon the similarity-attraction perspective, we further proposed that proactive leaders use more empowerment when followers are also proactive. To test the hypotheses, we collected daily diary data from 96 dyads of leaders and followers for 10 consecutive working days. Our findings suggest that proactive leaders engage in job crafting themselves and display empowering behaviors towards proactive followers; in turn, leader job crafting and empowering behaviors are both positively related to follower job crafting. Theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed.