مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

The best way to predict your future is to create it (Abraham Lincoln) This quote, commonly used by leaders when asked about how their organizations succeed in adapting to a rapidly changing business environment, relates to one of the most frequently used active performance concepts: proactive behavior (Fay & Frese, 2001). At the individual level, proactive behavior is about taking initiative in improving current circumstances by challenging the status quo rather than passively adapting to present conditions (Crant, 2000; Parker, Williams, & Turner, 2006). Adequate levels of employee proactive behaviors are needed for an organization’s capability to create its own future; be it through innovation in products or services, transformation of its business model or organizational change. Research has shown that employee proactive behavior results in favorable individual outcomes such as a higher level of innovation (Seibert, Kraimer, & Crant, 2001), leadership effectiveness (Bateman & Crant, 1993), task performance (Fuller & Marler, 2009) and greater career success (Seibert, Kraimer, & Liden, 2001), all of which in turn positively contribute to organizational performance and development.

izational performance and development. The importance of employee proactivity for contemporary work organizations has motivated substantial research output examining its antecedents. However, most research has focused on the role of individual dispositional characteristics and immediate work environment features (Fay & Frese, 2001; Fritz & Sonnentag, 2009; Griffin, Neal, & Parker, 2007; Lam, Spreitzer, & Fritz, 2014; Parker & Collins, 2010; Parker et al., 2006), while the role of broader contextual influences is mostly unexplored. We know from extant research that situational opportunities and constraints at the organizational level play a vital role in influencing essential employee behaviors such as organizational citizenship behavior, absenteeism, turnover, and performance (Johns, 2006, p. 386). Therefore, examining the effects of organizational-level factors should in the same vein provide for a more comprehensive understanding of mechanisms that lead to proactive behavior of individuals in the organizational setting and hence contribute to closing the gap between micro and macro research on employee proactivity (Bamberger, 2008).

In this paper, we aim to unveil the role of the organizational context as a cross-level effect in fostering employee proactive behavior (see Johns, 2006). Specifically, we examine how the interplays between relevant HR system configurations (Lepak & Snell, 1999) and generic relational climates (Fiske, 1992; Mossholder, Richardson, & Settoon, 2011) affect proactive behavior of employees. HR systems and organizational climate have for long been among the most influential dimensions of organizational context as far as their effects on employee attitudes and behaviors are concerned (Ferris et al., 1998; Kuenzi & Schminke, 2009). However, they have not yet been used to explain proactive behavior of employees in organizations. Moreover, as Johns notes (2006, p. 389), contextual features have frequently been “studied in a piecemeal fashion, in isolation from each other.” This paper attempts to overcome this limitation of extant research by examining the effects of two specific, outcome-relevant interplays between elements of the organizational context on proactive behavior.