Proactive Personality And Its Impact On Burnout And Job Performance

In the past decades, employees play certain roles which are strictly defined in organizations, and related researches took employees as objects who are very passive in adapting to the circumstances and taking in tasks. Whereas, with the desalting of functional monitoring, organizations rely more and more on pro-activity of the employees' to find and solve problems. Besides, the decentralization of organizational forms also encourages pro-activeness in organizations. Recently, more and more researches were conducted to test the pro-activity of employees' and the concept of proactive personality was raised upon these researches, which is a stable tendency that individuals adopt pro-activity to influence pro-activity surrounding environment, and a stable factor that shows individual differences in influencing pro-activity.Researches showed that proactive personality actively influences private and organizational outcome, especially in areas such as job performance, career developing, new staff adaption, effectiveness of leadership, carving out, and team effectiveness, etc... Unfortunately these researches were conducted in western cultures and it is very rare to find studies on proactive personality and its influences in China.In the first research of the present study, the cross cultural correlation of the Chinese Proactive Personality Scale (PPS) was tested. The result shows that the Chinese version of PPS does not have a good reliability and validity. Based on this, revisions to the scale were conducted, the procedures includes, by means of differentiation analysis, internal consistency reliability, retest reliability, split-half reliability test, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. The result shows that the revised scale is very good in both reliability and validity and can be taken as a tool to measure proactive personality.In the second research, based on the revised PPS in the first research, proactive personality and its influences on job performance and burnout were measured. Firstly, examined proactive personality and the rate of burnout by means of self-rating, job performance by other-rating, and compared the proactive personality of different individuals through employees. Then evaluated the influences of proactive personality on burnout and job performance, the results of difference tests showed that gender influences proactive personality greatly while education history and age does not. The higher group differs greatly from the lower group in job performance, and the two groups share the same tendency, which is task performance correlates to contextual performance positively and significantly. The result also showed that proactive personality correlates to reduced personal accomplishment significantly but insignificantly to burnout.Based on the present studies, conclusions can be drawn as follows:I. The English version of PPS is not consistent in a cross cultural circumstance. Whereas the revised scale in Chinese meets the demand of psychometrics and can be used to measure and evaluate proactive personality.II. Proactive personality is influenced by gender, but not demographic factors such as education history, age, etc...III. Proactive personality correlated to job performance significantly, which can be a valid prediction to job performances of employees'.IV. Proactive personality correlated to the reduced personal accomplishment of job burnout significantly, but does not influence emotional exhaustion and cynicism.