TY  - JOUR
A1  - Pingel, Ruta
A1  - Fay, Doris
A1  - Urbach, Tina
T1  - A resources perspective on when and how proactive work behaviour leads to employee withdrawal
JF  - Journal of occupational and organizational psychology
N2  - Previous organizational behaviour research has mainly focused on the benefits of proactivity while disregarding its possible drawbacks. The present study examines the ways in which proactive behaviour may foster counterproductive behaviour through increased emotional and cognitive strain. Drawing on conservation of resources theory, we propose that proactive behaviour is a resource-consuming activity that causes irritability and work-related rumination, which, in turn, leads to instrumentally driven employee withdrawal. Further, we hypothesize that external motivation towards proactivity amplifies its strain-eliciting effects. We conducted a longitudinal three-wave questionnaire study (N = 231) and tested hypotheses using an autoregressive, time-lagged model with latent variables. Results showed that when external motivation for proactivity was high, proactivity led to increased irritability and rumination; irritability was, in turn, related to higher levels of withdrawal. The moderated mediation analysis revealed that when external motivation towards proactive behaviour was high, proactive behaviour had an indirect effect on withdrawal behaviour via irritability. The direct effect of proactivity on work-related rumination was in the expected direction, but failed to reach conventional levels of significance (beta = .09, p = .08). Our results indicate that proactivity is not without costs, most clearly if motivated by external reasons.
KW  - proactive work behavior
KW  - strain
KW  - employee withdrawal
KW  - external motivation
KW  - longitudinal research
Y1  - 2019
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/joop.12254
SN  - 0963-1798
SN  - 2044-8325
VL  - 92
IS  - 2
SP  - 410
EP  - 435
PB  - Wiley
CY  - Hoboken
ER  -