Proactivity's hidden ceiling: how organizational conditions undermine the sustainability of proactive behavior

Abstract

Many organizations invest in developing proactive employees while simultaneously maintaining structural conditions that make proactivity unsustainable. This paper addresses that contradiction. Although research has documented the psychological costs of proactive behavior at the episode level, how these dynamics accumulate into longer-term behavioral trajectories remains theoretically underdeveloped, as does the role of organizational conditions in shaping which trajectory employees follow. Integrating Conservation of Resources theory with Self-Determination Theory, a multilevel framework is developed that identifies four proactivity trajectories over time: sustainable, contingent, declining, and suppressed, tracked jointly through an employee's visible initiative and the self-efficacy and motivational quality supporting it. Organizational structural conditions are identified as predictors of trajectory type, setting a “ceiling” within which individual regulatory resources operate. Performance management and leadership behavior translate these conditions into daily employee experience. Eleven propositions and a future research agenda are derived. The framework argues that sustaining proactivity over time is primarily an organizational design problem, not an individual development one, with direct implications for HR practice, work design, and the management of initiative at work.