The effect of service workers' proactive personality on their psychological withdrawal behaviors: a moderating effect of servant leadership

Abstract

PurposeA worker with a proactive personality actively pursues changes in the environment instead of maintaining the status quo, leading to an expected result of a negative relationship between proactive personality and psychological withdrawal behaviors. The authors propose that based on the trait activation theory (TAT), this negative relationship is moderated by servant leadership.Design/methodology/approachEmpirical data collected from subway station workers in three metropolitan cities in South Korea supported all the hypothesized relationships. Even though the workers are not public servants, the subway companies are owned by three metropolitan cities. With reliability and validity tests for the measurements, the authors performed an ordinary least square (OLS) hierarchical multiple regression analysis for hypotheses testing.FindingsA multilevel analysis showed that the higher a worker's proactive personality is, the less likely it is that he/she shows withdrawal behaviors at work and that the negative relationship between the two is stronger under servant leadership. An organization pursuing maximization of its members' proactive personality may find an advantage in servant leadership.Research limitations/implicationsFirst, the data was collected from three metropolitan city-owned companies, which may have different work attitudes and behaviors. Second, the authors hypothesized and found a negative relationship between the predictor and the dependent variable. To apply TAT more appropriately, the dependent variable could have been a positive work behavior showing a positive relationship between the predictor and the dependent variable.Originality/valueThe results of this study have both theoretical and empirical implications. In terms of theoretical implication, the study rather indirectly supports TAT. While Greenbaum et al. (2017) demonstrated the triggering effect of abusive supervision on employees' Machiavellianism, which leads to unethical behaviors, this study showed a stronger negative relationship between proactive personality and psychological withdrawal behaviors. This study provided empirical evidence showing servant leadership's role in lowering negative behaviors. This study's findings suggest how an organization could maximize the benefits of members' proactive personality under high servant leadership.

Servant Leadership and Employee Engagement: A Qualitative Study

“…Proactive personality is the personality of those who tend to take control of the environment, by seeking out opportunities, showing initiative and persevering to bring about meaningful change (Bateman & Crant, 1993 ; Parker & Collins, 2010 ). Previous literature has already demonstrated that proactive personality influences how followers respond to servant leaders (Newman et al, 2017 ) and is in turn influenced by servant leadership itself (Panaccio et al, 2015 ; Song & Lee, 2020 ), leading to a series of positive individual outcomes, such as the willingness to master tasks and goals. All these factors contribute significantly to increasing employee engagement, as reported by junior resources: “I try to create my own motivation, ambition and vision in everyday work”; “Personal motivation is very high and I am enthusiastic about my work”; “The fact that the more effort I put in, the better the result I obtain, is inspirational to me”.…”

Effect of Organizational Socialization of New Employees on Team Innovation Performance: A Cross-Level Model

“…This means that servant leadership is helpful in forming a high-quality relationship and creating an inclusive environment. 35 , 87 When new employees become members of the organization, highly socialized employees have stronger social network relationships, which provides favorable conditions for the voice behaviors among members. 51 , 77 , 78 However, servant leadership has no significant moderating effect on the relationship between organizational socialization and promotive voice behavior.…”

COVID-19-related job insecurity and employees’ behavioral outcomes: mediating role of emotional exhaustion and moderating role of symmetrical internal communication

“…The alpha reliability of withdrawal behaviors was 0.87. Following the precedence of earlier studies, we controlled for age, gender, education, tenure, hotel category and hotel size (Chan et al , 2020; Song and Lee, 2020; Zhu et al , 2019).…”