Explaining benefits of employee proactive personality: The role of engagement, team proactivity composition and perceived organizational support

•Proactive personality (PP) relates to job performance and counterproductive work behavior.•The relationship between PP and outcomes is mediated by employee engagement.•Organizational support and team PP composition moderate the relationship between PP and work engagement.•PP relates more strongly to engagement when organizational support, team PP diversity are low, and average team PP is high.

Proactive personality is an individual difference factor capturing the behavioral tendency toward displaying proactive behaviors to enact positive situational changes. Drawing from the Job Demands - Resources framework and trait activation theory, we conducted two studies to extend the proactive personality literature by responding to calls to explore how and under which circumstances proactive personality affects work outcomes. We found that work proactive personality related to performance (i.e., task performance and counterproductive work behaviors) through its relationship with engagement in a field study of 340 employee-supervisor dyads (study 1). In order to explore what organizational factors can be targeted to intervene or support employees who lack proactive personality, we explored the boundary conditions and organizational circumstances of the proactive personality-engagement relationship. We conducted a multilevel study of 52 teams (study 2) and showed that perceived organizational support and team proactive personality composition (mean) moderated the relationship between individual proactive personality and work engagement. Specifically, this positive relationship was found to be stronger among employees who had low perceived organizational support, and who worked in teams with high team proactive personality means.