Leadership and employee proactivity

An employee sees an urgent problem that needs to be solved or an opportunity for improvement that could save time, money, or enhance service. Ideally, the employee either takes the initiative to tackle the issue or speaks up and alerts the leader to the problem or opportunity, but that, of course, does not always occur. Employees taking initiative and speaking up rather than withholding ideas, suggestions, and opinions, in other words, employee proactivity, is important for rms as it can enhance organizational eectiveness and improve organizational decision making (e.g., Morrison, 2011). Proactivity at work covers a broad range of more general behaviors that include not only voicing concerns and making suggestions for improvements (e.g., Van Dyne & LePine, 1998), solving problems, and taking the initiative (Frese & Fay, 2001), but also more specic behaviors such as feedback seeking (e.g., Ashford, Blatt, & Walle, 2003), selfimprovement oriented or career focused initiative (Belschak & Den Hartog, 2010), innovative work behavior (De Jong & Den Hartog, 2010), or selling issues to management (e.g., Dutton & Ashford, 1993). Mostly here we focus on the more general proactive work behaviors in relation to leadership.