Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Vocational Behavior journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jvb Explaining benefits of employee proactive personality: The role of engagement, team proactivity composition and perceived organizational support Zhuxi Wang a , Jing Zhang b , Candice L. Thomas c , Jia Yu a , Christiane Spitzmueller a,⁎ a University of Houston, United States b California State University San Bernardino, United States c Saint Louis University, United States ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Proactive personality Work engagement Perceived organizational support Team personality composition ABSTRACT Proactive personality is an individual difference factor capturing the behavioral tendency toward displaying proactive behaviors to enact positive situational changes. Drawing from the Job Demands – Resources framework and trait activation theory, we conducted two studies to extend the proactive personality literature by responding to calls to explore how and under which circumstances proactive personality affects work outcomes. We found that work proactive personality related to performance (i.e., task performance and counterproductive work beha- viors) through its relationship with engagement in a field study of 340 employee-supervisor dyads (study 1). In order to explore what organizational factors can be targeted to intervene or support employees who lack proactive personality, we explored the boundary conditions and organizational circumstances of the proactive personality-engagement relationship. We con- ducted a multilevel study of 52 teams (study 2) and showed that perceived organizational support and team proactive personality composition (mean) moderated the relationship between individual proactive personality and work engagement. Specifically, this positive relationship was found to be stronger among employees who had low perceived organizational support, and who worked in teams with high team proactive personality means. Proactive employees are of great value to organizations (Crant, 2000; Fuller & Marler, 2009). They are characterized as being unconstrained by situational limitations and likely to seek out opportunities to shape one's environment by bringing about meaningful changes (Bateman & Crant, 1993). Proactive personality is a unique dispositional characteristic defined as a behavioral tendency toward taking personal initiative in creating a favorable environment (Bateman & Crant, 1993; Crant, 2000). Mounting empirical evidence has accumulated in the past two decades showing that proactive personality is associated with desirable outcomes at the individual, team, and organization levels, including job performance (e.g., Chan, 2006; Li, Liang, & Crant, 2010; Thomas, Whitman, & Viswesvaran, 2010), creativity (Kim, Hon, & Crant, 2009), positive work attitudes and perceptions (Chan, 2006), and newcomer adaptation (Chan & Schmitt, 2000; Kim et al., 2009). Fuller and Marler (2009), in a meta-analytic review of the research on proactive personality, purport that proactive personality is consistently positively related to career success and job performance above and beyond other commonly utilized individual difference variables. Despite the fruitful explorations of proactive personality's effects as a precursor of relevant individual and organizational outcomes, there are critical areas about which we know relatively little. First, although our understanding of relationships between http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2017.04.002 Received 31 May 2016; Received in revised form 12 April 2017; Accepted 17 April 2017 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: cspitzmueller@uh.edu (C. Spitzmueller). Journal of Vocational Behavior 101 (2017) 90–103 Available online 19 April 2017 0001-8791/ © 2017 Published by Elsevier Inc. MARK