The impact of subordinates’ proactive personality on empowering leadership

• Main Author: ZHAN, Xin
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2023
• Subjects: proactive personality; empowering leadership; leader-member exchange; political skill; humble leadership; Business Administration, Management, and Operations; Leadership Studies
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/etd_coll/482; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/etd_coll/article/1480/viewcontent/GPBA_AY2017_DBA_Zhan_Xin.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Research has documented numerous benefits of proactive personality for employees’ job outcomes. However, the success of proactive employees largely depends on their leaders’ empowerment. Extant research has focused on the bright side of proactive personality for inducing empowerment, without considering its risks. We thus have an incomplete understanding of the effects of employees’ proactive personality on empowering leadership. I take a balanced perspective on proactive personality and propose that proactive personality has an inverted U-shaped relationship with empowering leadership, such that empowering leadership is highest when proactive personality is at a moderate level. I argue that leader-member exchange (LMX) mediates this nonlinear relationship and further examine employees’ political skill and humble leadership as moderators of the relationship between proactive personality and LMX. I conducted a time-lagged, dual-source survey study to test the hypothesized model. The results supported the inverted U-shaped effect of employees’ proactive personality on empowering leadership via the mediation of LMX. Moreover, employees’ political skill marginally moderated the inverted U-shaped effect of proactive personality on LMX such that when political skill was high, the inflection point was closer to the upper right. The proposed moderating effect of humble leadership was not supported. This thesis offers theoretical implications for the consequences of proactive personality and the prediction of empowering leadership.