Disentangling The Mechanism Between Intra-organizational Trust And Employee's Proactive Behavior

One of the critical goals of human resource management research is to promote and improve employees' proactive behaviors and initiatives,which is also always pursued by organizational managers for the sake of organizations.Facing the dynamic external environment,complicated tasks,the various requirements of innovations and changes and the emergence of knowledge workers,it is becoming more and more important for employees to be proactive,which is also one of the main sources of organizational competitive advantage.Reactive and passive employees may have difficulty in meeting the various needs in the changing workplace.Therefore,it is the imperative that organizations try to effectively promote employees' proactivity and improve its performance in order for organizational development.However,although organizations have already taken measures to achieve this goal,it is still a big problem.There are many factors influencing employees' proactive behaviors.Some with particular characteristics are prone to be proactive;others may do the work in the proactive way out of the requirements.Organizational factors can not only affect employees' willingness but also create different opportunities,which are more important in promoting employees' proactive behaviors than individual level factors.For managers,these are also effective ways to promote employees' proactive work behaviors by implementing proper organizational policies and practices.Meanwhile,As for the research,less attention has been paid to the organizational factors or situational factors of promoting and inhibiting employee proactive behaviors by scholars,compared with the studies of individual level factors.Leading scholars have already called for more research in this regard for many times.Because employees engage in different proactive behaviors usually under some interpersonal risks,therefore,the perceptions about interpersonal relations in the workplace should have significant impact on their willingness and proactive behavior.In the hoping of filling this research gap and providing more valuable suggestions for organizational managers.This article systematically examines how the three different foci-based employee trust affect their employee proactive behaviors,and further investigates the important boundary condition of the relationship between employees'role breadth self-efficacy and proactive behaviors.Specifically,we developed the research questions from the requirements of innovations and changes facing organizations,the reality of lack of employees'proactive behaviors in the workplace and extant research gaps.This article seeks to unravel the mechanism between trust-in-organization(TIO),trust-in-supervisor(TIS),trust-in-coworkers(TIC)and employees' proactive behaviors.The moderating role of the job autonomy(JA)is also been examined.Based on the literature review related to proactive behavior,trust,self-efficacy and job autonomy,we develop the conceptual model,following the analytical framework "Situational Cues-Perception-Behavior,and the social cognitive theory,social exchange theory and situational strength theory.Futhermore,we explain the relationships among focal variables.Besides,this article measures focal constructs by adapting existing scales,and tests scales' reliabilities and validities by pilot study.At last,we conduct a series of confirmatory factor analyses to test the different scales' convergent validity and discriminate validity and hypotheses-testing using survey data,by correlation analyses,variance analyese,hierarchical regression and structure equation modeling.The direct effects among the focal constructs are examined.The mediating role of role breadth self-efficacy between three different foci-based trust and employees' proactive behavior is examined and the moderating role of job autonomy between role-breadth self efficacy and employee's proactive behavior is also tested.The results are demonstrated as follows.(1)Employees' age and positions have significant impact on their proactive behavior;(2)trust-in-organization,trust-in-supervisor and trust-in-coworker significantly correlate with proactive behavior and role breadth self-efficacy respectively,and role breadth self-efficacy significantly correlates with proactive behavior;(3)three different types of trust have different influnce on employees' proactive behavior.Particularly,compared with TIO,TIS and TIC have stronger impact on employees' proactive behavior,and TIC have stronger impact on employees'proactive behavior than that of TIS;(4)role breadth self-efficacy partially significantly mediated the relationship between two different types of trust and employees' proactive behavior,but the mediating role of role breadth self-efficacy between trust-in-organizaition and employees' proactive behavior was not significant;(5)the moderating role of job autonomy between role breadth self-efficacy and employees' proactive work behavior was also not empirically supported.By doing these above,this article makes significant theoretical contributions to related literatures in several ways.First,we deepen the understanding about the critical situational factors in promoting employee proactivity,which are relatively less studied in the literature.Second,we broaden the studies regarding the different antecedents and outcomes of different foci-based trust.Third,we disentangle the mechanism that how trust affect specific employee behavior.Last but not least,we further examine the reliability and validity of the scales of role breadth self-efficacy and taking charge(proactive behavior),and actively explore the various employees'proactive behaviors in the Chinese context.Furthermore,besides,the findings can also have significant implications for organizational managers,to help them make full use of human assets to build competitive advantage in ever-changing environment.