Coworkers’ Reactions to Proactive Employees: A Contingent Dual-path Model

Proactive employees are increasingly important in modern organizations. Although prior research has primarily focused on the impact of proactive personality on the outcomes of such employee, emerging studies have started to highlight the importance of how coworkers respond to employee proactivity. Extending such investigations, we take an associative evaluation framework to develop theory that explains when and why coworkers respond both positively and negatively to the proactive employee. Specifically, we propose a contingent dual-path model where the coworker evaluates the proactive employee with higher work ability as responsible to the organization and responds by increasing help towards such employee. In contrast, when a proactive employee is lower in work ability, the coworker evaluates the proactive employee as distracted from work tasks and responds with less help towards this employee. We utilize social relations analysis to test our model through two-wave and multi-source round-robin survey data and find support for our hypothesized contingent dual-path model. Our findings provide novel insights that show both the positive and negative pathways through which coworkers evaluate proactive employees which in turn influence the help that coworkers extend towards such employees.