The Role of Permission in the Employee Proactivity Process

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Akben, Mustafa; Vogel, Ryan M.
• 署名单位: Elon University; Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education (PCSHE); Temple University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0021-9010
• DOI: 10.1037/apl0001271
• 发表日期: 2025
• 页码: 1264-1282
• 关键词: employee proactivity; proactive work behavior; permission; permission perceptions; deontic regulations

摘要

The predominant view in the employee proactivity literature highlights the importance of personality as well as a trio of agentic forces-namely, can do, reason to, and energized to motivation-that drive employee proactive behavior. Complementing existing theoretical frameworks, we introduce the concept of proactivity permission, defined as an employee's tacit perception of the extent to which they are allowed to perform proactive behaviors at work. In this article, we investigate the psychological experience of proactivity permission. Directly drawn from the dominance theory of deontic reasoning, we model a set of individual (employee status, psychological entitlement), relational (leader-member exchange), and group-level predictors (organizational rule consistency, normative tightness) of proactivity permission and demonstrate the construct's value in predicting proactive behavior over and above many well-established antecedents from the literature. In a field study of 388 employees and 110 supervisors in 35 organizations, we found support for our predictions. We discuss implications of our work for the literature on employee behavior and proactive work behavior.