The Impact Of Autonomous Motivation And Controlled Motivation To Proactive Behavior

In the age of information explosion, enterprises are facing more and more uncertainty and greatly increasing market competition. With the accelerating product innovation and the popularity of the Internet technology, in order to maintain competitiveness, it is needed for companies that every employee can keep enthusiastic and creative, so as to complete daily work creatively with a more proactive approach. Meanwhile, for individual employees, in order to stand out among the many competitors and to grow being busy with a large number of duplicate and trivial daily work, employees need to take more proactive behaviors, such as proactive individual innovation, proactive taking charge, proactive voice, and proactive feedback seeking.In this paper, we embarked from the employees’ proactive behaviors, mainly discussed the impact of individual motivation during the formation of proactive behaviors. According to self-determination theory, individual motivation can be divided into two major categories, which are autonomous motivation and controlled motivation. In this paper, we studied employees with autonomous motivation and employees with controlled motivation both, trying to understand the effect of motivation on the formation of proactive behaviors. We found that both autonomous and controlled motivation can effect proactive behaviors in a significantly positive way. Meanwhile, according to the social exchange theory, perceived organization support theory and organizational fairness theory, we extracted two variables of the organizational climate:perceived organizational support and perceived organizational fairness, to study their moderation impact on this process. We found that in the process of controlled motivation to proactive behaviors, the moderation of perceived organizational fairness is significantly positive, while the moderation of perceived organizational support is not significant. In the process of autonomous motivation to proactive behaviors, both the moderation of perceived organizational support and perceived organizational fairness are significantly positive.Finally, this paper recommended that companies should pay attention to proactive behaviors of employees and build appropriate organizational climate for employees with different kinds of motivations, so as to promote the formation of their proactive behaviors. With the fairness organizational climate, both the employees with autonomous motivation and controlled motivation can be promoted. For the employees with autonomous motivation, it also helps a lot to give them more organizational support.