What makes employees more proactive? Roles of job embeddedness, the perceived strength of the HRM system and empowering leadership

Abstract

Drawing on the theory of planned behavior, the current study examined the effects of employees’ job embeddedness and the perceived strength of the human resource management (HRM) system on their proactive work behaviors, as well as the moderation effect of empowering leadership on these relationships. We tested our hypotheses using data collected from 206 Chinese employees in a three‐wave survey. The results demonstrated the positive effects of both job embeddedness and the perceived strength of the HRM system on employees’ proactive work behaviors. We also found that the relationship between the perceived strength of the HRM system and proactive work behaviors was stronger when the levels of empowering leadership were high rather than low. However, the moderation effect of empowering leadership on the relationship between job embeddedness and proactive work behaviors was not significant. Our study contributes to the understanding of the antecedents of Chinese employees’ proactive work behaviors from the perspective of motivation and behavioral control.

Why and How Does Empowering Leadership Promote Proactive Work Behavior? An Examination with a Serial Mediation Model among Hotel Employees

“…Empowering leadership can enrich the job design characteristics, which make employees stay in their job and have the willingness to stay in their organization for the long term [ 30 , 31 ]. Employees are highly reliant on interactions with customers, and organizational embeddedness makes them further proactive at work [ 96 ], which fosters excellent job performance and workplace mental health [ 97 ]. That is, job characteristics and job embeddedness are critical motivational mechanisms in the indirect positive effects of empowering leadership and proactive work behavior.…”

“…Thus, job embeddedness can be a critical factor in job attitude and can have a positive effect on work outcomes. In this vein, job embeddedness makes employees more proactive than before [ 96 ], and employees with organizational embeddedness have been shown to be proactive at work and have a strong influence on excellent service performance [ 97 ]. Most of all, drawing from the theory of planned behavior that links individual beliefs to behavior [ 98 ], subjective norm, attitude, and perceived behavioral control are three core ingredients, which collectively develop an individual planned behavior.…”

Human resources management and open innovation: the role of open innovation mindset

“…OI mindset). SHRM, therefore, plays a critical role in building an OI mindset through flat-hierarchies such as semi-autonomous work teams, job rotation, performance management systems, information sharing and reward/incentive systems that emphasie R&D team collaboration internal and external to the organiation (Jia et al 2020;Kwon, Cho and Song 2019;Wattoo, Zhao and Xi 2020). Thus, we hypothesie the following: Hypothesis 2: SHRM is positively related to OI mindset.…”

Contextualizing employee perceptions of human resource management: a review of China‐based literature and future directions

“…The role of HRM system strength has been widely discussed in the 'antecedent-mediator-moderator-outcome' framework. First, there is a burgeoning stream of literature on the role of HRM system strength as antecedent to individual and organizational outcomes (Jia et al 2020;Li, Frenkel and Sanders 2011). Second, a sizable proportion of studies have investigated whether HRM system strength, as a uniform system, moderates the linkages between HR practices and individual (or organizational) outcomes (Guan and Frenkel 2019; Sanders et al 2018).…”