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It is vital in today’s society that teachers are proactively involved in educational change. Given that proactive motivation is a critical driver of proactivity, this study aims to investigate how teachers’ formal and informal workplace-learning experiences were connected with their proactive motivations to implement educational change.

The authors used a qualitative case study approach to describe the relationships between teachers’ formal and informal learning activities and their different proactive motivations. The authors collected data from 17 teachers via individual interviews and open-ended questionnaire and performed analyses using a continuous inductive and deductive coding process.

The authors found that informal teacher learning can trigger three types of proactive motivation, whereas formal teacher learning is mainly connected with the can do and energised to motivations. The authors also found that formal and informal learning complement and compete with each other in shaping the can do motivation. Moreover, the authors found that informal learning played the dominant role in the reason to motivation, whereas informal and formal learning were separately connected to the energised to motivation.

These findings indicate that greater attention must be paid to teachers’ informal workplace-learning experiences. Specifically, teachers’ informal learning experiences should be actively integrated into their formal workplace training to enhance their proactive motivation to educational change. Moreover, teachers’ learning preferences and teaching experience should be considered in the design of teacher-training programmes.

Based on the proactive motivation model of Parker et al. (2010), the authors have uncovered the mechanisms of workplace learning that drive teacher proactivity. The authors have examined the relationship between teachers’ formal and informal workplace-learning and proactive teaching. The findings will assist policymakers and administrators to identify effective means of motivating teachers to engage in workplace learning.

This study aims to investigate cross-level influences of team cohesion, trust and conflicts on team member’s proactive motivational profiles and outcomes of profile membership over time.

Data was collected in a four-month longitudinal field study with 47 teams (N = 202).

Latent profile analysis derived four proactive motivational profiles. The higher motivated profiles reported better study outcomes, higher levels of team trust and cohesion and fewer conflicts over time. Team trust and interpersonal conflicts emerged as significant predictors of profile membership.

Recommendations are derived on how to best manage teams and the members comprising it when trust in teams is low or interpersonal conflicts are high.

Applying a person-centred approach in a team context advances multi-level theories of team motivation by mapping the cross-level effects of team processes on different kinds of motivational states.

This paper aims at examining the relationship between proactive personality and training motivation among older workers (aged over 55 years) in a context characterized by the growing ageing of the global population. First, the authors hypothesized that proactive personality predicts the motivation to learn among older workers and that this relationship is mediated by goal orientation. In particular, the authors hypothesized that learning goal orientation may mediate the relationship between proactive personality and learning motivation.

The employees of an Italian bank completed an online questionnaire. AMOS 17 was used to carry out confirmatory factor analysis, and the SPSS macro was used to test the meditational model.

The results confirmed both the hypotheses, demonstrating the influence of proactive personality on training motivation of older workers, as mediated by goal orientation and, in particular, by learning goal orientation.

From an applicative point of view, this study may have implications for organizations that aim to increase the employability of older people by encouraging them to undertake more training. In particular, interventions aimed at increasing learning goal orientation could contribute in strengthening proactive personality that, in turn, may affect levels of training motivation.

Even if proactive personality has already been found as a predictor of learning motivation, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the present study demonstrates that the relationship between proactive personality and training motivation is mediated by goal orientation among older workers.

We examine how input- (vs. output-) based performance evaluation and incentive intensity impact employees’ autonomous motivation, thereby influence their proactive work behaviors.

We collected survey responses from 309 employees of different firms. Multi-group Structural Equation Modeling analyses were used to analyze the data.

Input-based evaluation had a positive effect on autonomous motivation and proactive work behaviors when task uncertainty was high, but a negative effect when it was low. Autonomous motivation had a positive effect on proactive work behaviors.

Our results on the moderating effect of task uncertainty provide insights into inconsistencies in earlier studies. Moreover, applying self-determination theory of motivation to incentive research can provide some insights into why sometimes, incentives can negatively affect performance.

The study of proactive work behaviors is important because despite their necessity in the fast-changing business environment, they are relatively unexplored in the incentive literature. Proactivity is especially important for tasks that are high in uncertainty because the exact tasks to achieve those goals are hard to specify.

We investigate the effect of performance management system on proactive work behaviors, mediated by autonomous motivation and moderated by task uncertainty.

Drawing on the model of proactive motivation, the purpose of this paper is to examine how transformational leadership influences followers’ voice behavior through three proactive motivation states, namely, “reason to,” “can do” and “energized to.” It also examines the moderating role of followers’ proactive personality in the relationship between transformational leadership and employee voice.

The online survey was distributed through Qualtrics using a two-wave design. In total, 1,454 participants completed the survey at Time 1, of those 447 also completed the survey at Time 2.

Transformational leadership influences employee voice via followers’ promotion focus, role-breadth self-efficacy and affective commitment. Followers’ proactive personality attenuates the impact of transformational leadership on voice, supporting the substitute for leadership hypothesis.

Self-reported data are the main limitation of the present study. Other limitations include treating employee voice as a unidimensional construct and oversimplifying the impact of positive affect on voice.

The present study suggests that training managers to demonstrate more transformational leadership behavior, enhancing employees’ proactive motivation and hiring proactive individuals are strategies to facilitate employee voice.

The present study contributes to a better understanding of employee voice from a proactive motivation perspective. It also demonstrates that followers’ proactive personality is important “boundary condition” to transformational leadership.

This study examined how inclusive leadership in the workplace promotes proactive behavior in employees based on self-determination theories and a model of motivation for proactive behavior.

Using a sample of 270 employees from various provinces in China, we investigated the relationship between inclusive leadership (measured at Time 1), workplace gratitude (measured at Time 1) and proactive behaviors (measured at Time 2). To test our hypotheses, SEM analysis was conducted to measure the path coefficients, followed by bootstrapping analysis to assess the indirect impacts of gratitude at work.

The results suggest that inclusive leadership could enhance subordinates’ propensity to be grateful, which in turn will increase the frequency of their proactive behaviors.

First, the evidence presented further validates the proposed association between inclusive leadership and proactive behavior, and it also enriches related theories. Second, our study introduced workplace gratitude as a mediator, deepening the understanding of the mechanisms linking inclusive leadership and proactive behavior.

Enterprise social media (ESM) are widely adopted in the organizations with the aim of improving employees' work performance. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the moderating effects of work context characteristics on the relationships between proactive motivations and usage behaviors of ESM communication and task collaboration feature sets.

Questionnaire surveys were used to gather data from 307 randomly chosen Chinese employees, who were also ESM users. The research model was examined using linear regression methods with the SPSS 24 software package.

The results indicate that work context characteristics (i.e. task interdependence and perceived organizational support) had significant moderating effects on the relationships between proactive motivations and usage behaviors.

By extending the model of proactive motivation to the ESM context, this study directly addresses how users can be energized to use ESM features.

Applying affect-as-information theory, this research analyzed the relationship of leader affective presence and employee proactive customer service performance (PCSP) in hospitality organizations. It further explored when and how leader affective presence influenced employee PCSP.

Taking a sample of 110 teams with 361 pairs of leaders and employees in Chinese hotels, a moderated mediation model was tested across individual and team levels using hierarchical linear modeling.

This study found that leader positive affective presence (LPAP) had a positive effect on employee PCSP, whereas leader negative affective presence (LNAP) had a negative effect on employee PCSP. Employee prosocial motivation mediated the relationship between leader affective presence and employee PCSP. The employee power distance value weakened the LNAP–employee prosocial motivation relationship, which subsequently mitigated the negative indirect effect of LNAP on employee PCSP through employee prosocial motivation.

The sample was drawn from one hotel group in China, which may limit external validity.

Hospitality organizations should emphasize the affective traits of leaders in employee initiatives. Leader affective presence should be considered during recruitment and promotion. Management should pay more attention to employee emotional management and value alignment.

The findings provide deeper insight into the role of LPAP and LNAP in influencing employees’ PCSP. It sheds new light on the mechanisms and conditions through which leader affective presence might heighten or hinder employee PCSP.

Proactivity is a type of goal-directed work behavior in which individuals actively take charge of situations to bring about future change in themselves or their organization. In this chapter, we draw on goal-regulation research to review conceptual and empirical evidence that elucidates some of the complex links of affective experience and employee proactivity. We identify the different ways in which affective experience influences different stages of proactivity, including employees’ efforts in setting a proactive goal (envisioning), preparing to implement their proactive goal (planning), implementing their proactive goal (enacting), and engaging in learning from their proactive goal process (reflecting). Overall, our review suggests an important, positive role of high-activated positive trait affectivity and moods in motivating proactivity across multiple goal stages, as compared to low-activated positive affectivity and moods. The role of negative affect is mixed, and likely depends on both its valence and the stage of proactivity that is being considered. We identify a lack of research on the role of discrete emotions for employee proactivity. We discuss future avenues for research, particularly the roles of intra- and inter-personal emotion regulation for proactivity and of affective embeddedness of proactive processes in the social environment of organizations.

Economic stressors such as job insecurity, job loss, unemployment, and underemployment cause severe difficulties for the workers affected, their families, organizations, and societies overall. Consequently, most past research has taken a thoroughly negative perspective on economic stress, addressing its diverse negative consequences and the ways that people try to cope with them. And even when following the advice provided by the scientific literature, people affected by economic stress will usually end up being off worse than they were before the onset of the stressor.

The current chapter pays credit to this perspective yet also tries to counterbalance it with an alternative one. While acknowledging the vast amount of literature outlining the negative consequences of economic stress on peoples’ well-being and careers, some literature also points at opportunities for a more positive perspective. More specifically, we argue that affected people can use a wide repertoire of behaviors for handling their current situation. Of particular promise in this regard is the concept of career adaptability, generally defined as the ability to change to fit into new career-related circumstances. Indeed, studies show that under certain conditions, career adaptability can facilitate people's search for not just any job but for a qualitatively better job, thus breaking through the spiral of losses usually associated with economic stress.

For the purpose of this argument, we link career adaptability to the concept of proactive coping, analyzing how and under which conditions career adaptability may present a contextualized form of proactive coping. We then address known personal and situational antecedents of career adaptability and show how career adaptability may be fostered and trained among different types of job seekers. We end this chapter with a discussion of open questions as well as directions for future research.