Examining why employee proactive personality influences empowering leadership: The roles of cognition‐ and affect‐based trust

Abstract

We integrate followership theory and trust theory to understand the role of employees' proactivity on their leaders' attitudes, cognitions, and behaviours. We propose that (1) employees' proactive personality engenders their leaders' cognition‐ and affect‐based trust, which in turn positively influences empowering leadership; (2) the indirect effects of proactive personality on empowering leadership via cognition‐ and affect‐based trust are contingent on the level of employee task performance and organizational citizenship behaviour, respectively; and (3) the indirect effect of proactive personality on empowering leadership via affect‐ (cognition‐) based trust is stronger when the level of cognition‐ (affect‐) based trust is high rather than low. We conducted two‐wave study, with a sample of 116 supervisor–employee dyads from a large petrochemical firm in South Korea to test proposed effects. Results suggest that leaders' affect‐based trust, but not cognition‐based trust, served to mediate the effect of proactive personality on empowering leadership. Moreover, the results further support that the positive mediation of leaders' affect‐based trust on empowering leadership was present when leaders' cognition‐based trust was high, but not when it was low. Implications for future research are discussed. Practitioner points Leaders report a greater level of trust in employees with a more proactive personality. Leaders are more likely to empower employees in whom they have higher levels of both affect‐based and cognition‐based trust; in other words, employees who they like more and believe to be more competent. To help promote empowering, organizations might consider selecting on the basis of proactive personality and fostering a culture that promotes employee proactivity.

Transformational leadership, proactive personality and service performance

“…Employees with a proactive personality actively initiate changes to achieve their work goals. Proactive individuals with high creativity are especially effective in looking for better ways to solve work issues (Bateman and Crant, 1993;Han et al, 2019). They work actively to seek out new information and practices to improve their performance (Bateman and Crant, 1993).…”

Nurturing individual job performance through psychological capital power

“…Empowering leadership is a leader behaviour that nurtures, motivates individuals in improving performance. Individual proactive attitudes reflect performance efforts in individual decision-making involvement (Han et al, 2019;Amundsen & Martinsen, 2014;Lorinkova et al, 2013). Proactive work actors (such as work attitude, career, creativity and innovation) are individual orientations and challenges to achieve successful performance; changes in individual behaviour will affect changes in the environment in the organisation (Carsten et al, 2018).…”

“…Empowering leadership is an individual's strength in building teamwork towards a successful performance process (Han et al, 2019). The gap phenomenon found was a gap in the leadership of the Minang migrants who were members of the Minang Family Migrants in building entrepreneurship in Purwokerto-Central Java.…”

Antecedents of psychological well-being among workers within small and medium enterprises

“…It is, therefore, important to understand how leaders influence the mindset and organisational behaviour of employees. Kearney, Shemla, Van Knippenberg and Scholz (2019) posited that EL leads to goal clarity in organisations but failed to address employee mental well-being, while Han, Harold and Cheong (2019) examined empowerment leadership and trust in organisations. The above-mentioned research however did not examine the influence of EL on an employee's PWB.…”