Take it to the Next Level: Proactive Personality and Creativity in Work Teams

Abstract

Proactive personality has gained its popularity in organizational behavior research for its motivational function in human agency, which is needed for addressing emergency, bringing changes and better adaptation to the environment both for the individual and the organization. Given that teams have become a common form in performing tasks for many modern organizations, and that teams often incorporate more complex interpersonal influences and interactions, it is informative to move the individual level of proactive personality research to team level. This symposium extends proactive personality research by presenting four studies that apply social network and person-environment interaction perspectives and constructs to model the effect of team proactive personality compositions and structures embedded in a team context on team and individual creativity. New light is shed on how the structural features of proactive personality may drive outcomes based on different compositions among members or between the team and the leader. Also, how individual member may be facilitated or inhabited under certain team level composition of proactive personality. In addition, this symposium also breaks new grounds with respect to the mechanisms (e.g., job redesign activities, social exchanges and in turn team motivational states) through which team proactive personality exert its effects on team outcomes under the regulations of team network structure. By drawing together and discussing the perspectives and insights of these four papers, this symposium will contribute to a thorough and integrated understanding of the effects of team congruence in proactive personality between team members, between team and the leader, as well as the conceptualization and operations of team level proactive personality. Besides identifying future research needs, this symposium may also have empirical implications for organizations that may benefit from the findings in building up teams and assigning leaders according to the feature of the team. Team-Leader Congruence in Proactive Personality and Team Creativity Presenter: Nan Wang; National U. of Singapore Presenter: Jing Zhang; U. of Houston Proactive Employees as Job Crafters: Proactive Personality and Employee Creativity in Work Teams Presenter: Xin-Ming Tian; Shanghai JiaoTong U. Presenter: Jessica Juhun Song; LG Economic Research Institute