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Proactivity Behaviors

Delivered March 23, 2020. Contributor: Methody G.

Goals

To provide information on the economic impact of PROACTIVITY as a prominent characteristic of a company's team and examples of behavior that would be observed of a team that demonstrates a high degree of proactivity in their thinking

Early Findings

Proactivity Behavior

  • One of the main characteristics that creative teams have in common is burnout prevention, as burnout is one of the main reasons for not being proactive or being less proactive. As such, leaders implementing and following specific steps to prevent burnout can be crucial for maintaining a high degree of employee proactivity.
  • In fact, leaders should constantly undertake actions to maintain or increase the resources of their employees and/or reduce their demand in order to avoid resource depletion.
  • Another way for leaders to stimulate the proactivity of their employees is by constantly offering rewards and recognizing great work. This way, people stay motivated to work harder and keep being proactive.
  • According to Forbes, promoting greater autonomy at the work place is another way to stimulate proactivity.
  • According to Chia Huei Wu, Associate Professor at Durham University, there are two types of proactive employees: those that express self-proactivity and employees that are proactive when working within a team to achieve an end goal.
  • As such, it is important that leaders "tailor each specific job role to suit individual preferences and encourage open discussion and participation to understand whether an employee’s responsibilities are in line with their motivators."
  • In fact, it is important that employers strive to create greater opportunities for "collaboration and set individual goals and rewards for the self-starters in order to get the desired results."
  • According to Uta Bindl, Professor at the London School of Economics and political Science, proactive behavior involves "self-initiated, anticipatory action aimed at changing either the situation or oneself. Examples include taking charge to improve work methods, proactive problem solving, using personal initiative, making i-deals, and proactive feedback seeking."

While information and statistics on the specific economic impact of proactivity on businesses was scarce. We were able to find one study that claimed that "proactive personalities and job crafting had a positive impact on the job performance of employees."

Proposed next steps:

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As our initial search focused on the behavior associated with proactivity in the workplace, we recommend focusing on 3-5 challenges to the implementation of proactivity at the workplace. For each challenge, we will describe what it consists of and why it is considered a challenge by industry experts, including an explanation about how companies are dealing with it.
As we were not able to find specific statistics about proactivity's impact on business operations, we recommend finding 2-3 examples of companies that have used proactive approaches to increase employee productivity and become more successful. For each example, we will detail the approach they used, how it helped employees become more proacive, and any indication of their success (i.e success metrics).