10603: A Proactive Perspective on Work Design: Leader Work Design Behavior and Team Outcomes (session 25491)

In recent years, employers have noted the importance of enriched work characteristics to stimulate employee proactivity, but they often overlook the proactive role leaders can play by designing others’ work (i.e., work design behavior). Drawing upon the self-regulation theory and the proactivity literature, our study focuses on the critical role of leader work design behavior in facilitating positive team proactive behavior trajectories and downstream team performance outcomes. Via a multi-wave, multi-source, and multi-level dataset of salespeople, we evidenced that leader work design behavior facilitated positive team proactive behavior trajectories via higher levels of team member work engagement, which then resulted in higher levels of team performance. We also counter-intuitively found that person-job misfit strengthened the positive effect of leader work design behavior on team proactive behavior trajectories, indicating leader work design behavior becomes more salient when team members suffer from person-job misfit. Our findings contribute to the work design research by using a proactive perspective to demonstrate how leader work design behavior can facilitate positive team outcomes in the long run.

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