Leadership Studies Commons^™

The Impact Of Subordinates’ Proactive Personality On Empowering Leadership, Xin Zhan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Research has documented numerous benefits of proactive personality for employees’ job outcomes. However, the success of proactive employees largely depends on their leaders’ empowerment. Extant research has focused on the bright side of proactive personality for inducing empowerment, without considering its risks. We thus have an incomplete understanding of the effects of employees’ proactive personality on empowering leadership. I take a balanced perspective on proactive personality and propose that proactive personality has an inverted U-shaped relationship with empowering leadership, such that empowering leadership is highest when proactive personality is at a moderate level. I argue that leader-member exchange (LMX) mediates …