Proactive behavior in organizations

Many practitioner-oriented publications argue that managers should be more proactive on the job, and that proactive behavior is an increasingly import ant component of job performance. Organizational research on the antecedent s and consequences of proactive behavior has appeared in several different literatures and has taken different approaches toward defining, measuring, and understanding proactivity. In this article, I review a diverse set of l iteratures that directly address proactive behavior in organizational conte xts. I describe four constructs related to proactive behavior: proactive pe rsonality, personal initiative, role breadth self-efficacy, and taking char ge. Next, I review six research domains that have explicitly addressed proa ctive behaviors: socialization, feedback seeking, issue selling, innovation , career management, and certain kinds of stress management. After consider ing findings from these research streams, I offer an analysis of the differ ent approaches to the study of proactive behavior and provide a set of sugg estions for further research. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights res erved.