Bachelor Thesis Research Proposal Study year 2017/2018
Merlijn Venus Semester 2 period 2
Julian van de Lagemaat 11051752
Participative leadership and proactive behaviour
Introduction
There is no way set in stone on how to act as a leader. There are many different leadership styles, each with different consequences on the people involved in the process. How can you influence to what extent your followers show proactive behaviour? As a leader, you have many choices you could make. Do you hold all authority and responsibility, or involve your subordinates in making decisions? Do you want to hold on to traditional values or try to initiate change in the organisation and its groups? Many researchers have already analysed the many existing leadership styles, and how they affect the organisation and the behaviour that subordinates show. It is important research because there is some form of leadership involved in every organisation.
Another factor that plays a role is the personality traits of both the leader and its
subordinates (Judge, Bono, Ilies & Gerhardt, 2002). Personality is generally seen as a constant factor as it does not tend to change drastically over time (Costa Jr & McCrae, 2002). However, attitude or mindset is a factor that can be affected, for instance by the leadership style and by the leader’s own personality traits.
Extant research has proven that proactivity of employees is beneficial for organisational performance (Thomas, Whitman & Viswesvaran, 2010). Fay and Frese (2001) have analysed personal initiative and its consequences. One of those consequences is that the environment can be changed by the individual. Companies are interested in personal initiative because it increases organisational
Statement of Originality
This document is written by Student Julian van de Lagemaat who declares to take full responsibility for the contents of this document.
I declare that the text and the work presented in this document are original and that no sources other than those mentioned in the text and its references have been used in creating it.
The Faculty of Economics and Business is responsible solely for the supervision of completion of the work, not for the contents.
and individual effectiveness (Fay and Frese, 2001). It will become even more important in the future, since companies will require a high degree of self-reliance (Frese, 1997). Proactive behaviour is also crucial in the process of innovation, influencing the transition from idea generation to idea
implementation (Rank, Pace, & Frese, 2004). In other to analyse proactivity, one could look at different leadership styles and how they influence proactivity. For instance, research has shown that participative leadership can lead to a higher degree of proactivity by subordinates (Taştan, 2013). The key characteristics of participative leadership are shared decision making, valuing others’ input, seeking concensus, increased autonomy and empowerment to subordinates (Bass & Bass, 2009; Rok, 2009; Huang, Iun, Liu & Gong, 2010).
Since proactive behaviour has a positive effect on both the individual and the organisational level, it is important for leaders how to understand proactive subordinate behaviour, what causes it and in what circumstances it can be used. Simply knowing that participative leadership can increase proactivity is not enough. Subordinates differ a lot from each other and so, different circumstances may influence outcomes. As such, a leader should look at how personality traits can affect the relationship between the participative leadership style and proactive subordinate behaviour. Little research has been done about this, even though it is important information to have as a leader in practice, meaning that this is a gap in current research.
My prediction is that out of the Big Five personality traits model (Goldberg, 1990)
extraversion is the personality trait that would be the most logical variable to show the interaction of the relationship between participative leadership and proactive behaviour, since some of its traits are seeking novelty and excitement and being assertive, action-oriented and engaging (Cherry, 2018), which all seem to make sense to enhance the degree of proactivity when a participative leadership style is being used. Given that extraverts share some of the traits with people that tend to show proactive behaviour, I expect that extraversion strengthens the effect of participative leadership on proactive behaviour.
Hence, in this study I will look at the main effect of participative leadership on the proactivity of subordinates, moderated by the degree of extraversion that subordinates possess. My prediction is that the higher the degree of subordinate extraversion is, the stronger the effect of participative leadership on subordinate proactivity will be.
This research could be used in practice by leaders if they are contemplating different leadership styles, and want to decide which style would be the most useful, depending on their subordinates’ personalities.
Theoretical framework
Proactivity is an important phenomenon as it has been shown to lead to higher performance, satisfaction, organisational commitment and social networking (Thomas et al., 2010). It is an
important factor since it is a complex phenomenom that has both personal and organisational consequences, hence it needs to be understood in order to influence it (Crant, 2000) Proactivity is officially defined as behaviour that creates or controls a situation by taking the initiative or by anticipating events (Oxford English Dictionary, 1989). Crant (2000) has defined it as “taking initiative in improving current circumstances; it involves challenging the status quo rather than passively adapting to present conditions.” Examples of proactivity are actively engaging in solving inefficiencies
in work processes, scanning new work environments for developmental needs and seeking to learn and enquire new knowledge to ensure future employability (van Veldhoven & Dorenbosch, 2008). Fay and Kamps (2006) have stated that personal initiative-taking towards job and development are important aspects for the modern workforce.
Antecedents of proactivity are not well understood (Parker, Williams & Turner, 2006). However, Parker (2000) has argued that specific motivation is needed for proactivity. Both Ohly and Fritz (2007) and Parker et al. (2006) have found that role breadth self-efficacy, defined as the extent to which people feel confident that they are able to carry out a broader and more proactive role (Parker, 1998), is positively related to proactive behaviour. Furthermore, Sonnentag (2003) indicates that, while the specific relationship between intrinsic motivation and proactivity has not been empirically examined, work engagement is positively related to daily proactive behaviour.
Another important determinant of proactive outcomes is job autonomy, which affects personal initiative (Frese, Garst & Fay, 2000), voice (Van Dyne & LePine, 1998), and suggesting improvements (Axtell et al., 2000). Job autonomy is linked with self-efficacy, which is a personal judgement of how well one can execute courses of action required to deal with prospective situations (Bandura, 1982). Job autonomy might raise self-efficacy through increasing enactive mastery, since it gives employees the chance to acquire new skills and master new responsibilities (Parker, 1998). It may also increase the controllability of a task (Gist & Mitchell, 1992). Frese et al., (2000) have shown that self-efficacy mediates the link between job autonomy and personal initiative. Parker, Wall and Jackson (1997) have found that job autonomy may increase proactive behaviour by developing flexible role orientations, since individuals develop ownership for decisions and long term goals that they support when they have an influence over a wider range of decisions.
A final antecedent of proactivity is co-worker trust. Research has shown that at the individual level, trust in the organisation predicts innovative behaviour (Clegg, Unsworth, Epitrokpaki & Parker, 2002), and at the organisational level, a climate for initiative is important for innovations and that
one reason such a climate may have an effect is through co-workers encouraging personal initiative (Baer and Frese, 2003).
The gap or problem that is interesting to address is how proactivity can be optimally increased from a leader’s perspective, meaning taking into account the leadership style and the subordinate’s personality traits. Strauss, Griffin and Rafferty (2009) have examined the link between leadership and proactive behaviour, and differentiated between organisational leadership and team leadership. They found that transformational leadership was positively related to unit commitment and role-breadth self-efficacy, and that organisational leadership was positively related with
organisational commitment, as well as team commitment. Their results suggest that leaders at both the team and organisational level can play an important role in developing subordinate proactivity, but that different levels of leadership are likely to affect proactive behaviour in different ways (Strauss et al., 2009)
Participative leadership is the most logical leadership style to analyse proactive behaviour with. For individuals to engage in proactive behaviour, it is necessary for them to care about their work and regard it as worthwhile to invest the extra effort (Sonnentag, 2003). Participative leadership is a leadership style that involves employees across levels of the hierarchy in decision-making (Rok, 2009). The inclusion in decision-decision-making could lead to more commitment to the organisation, hence in this study, participative leadership is the independent variable and proactive behaviour is the dependent variable. Previous research has already looked at the relationship between participative leadership and work performance, by means of two models. On the one hand, the motivational model tells us that opportunities to participate in the decision-making process provide subordinates with greater intrinsic work rewards (Conger & Kanungo, 1988; Thomas & Velthouse, 1990). On the other hand, the exchange-based model indicates that since participative leadership behaviour sends the message that the leader has confidence in, and respect for the subordinates, this sort of leadership behaviour is likely to hold higher levels or trust in said leader. This results in subordinates being more likely to reciprocate their leader, and show a higher level of
work performance (Cohen, 1992; Zellars & Tepper, 2003). Participative leadership is also likely to increase the quality of decisions (Scully, Kirkpatrick & Locke, 1995). Furthermore, it is believed that participative leadership has an enormous advantage over its contrasting style of directive leadership when it comes to organisational and team effectiveness (Byrk, Easton, Kerbow, Rollow & Sebring, 1993; Hargreaves, 1994). Additionally, subordinate participation would increase the correspondence between organisation and subordinate goals, since it would make sense that a subordinate would select the goals they want when participating in decisions about various goals (House & Mitchell, 1975). Finally, Taştan (2013) has found that all aspects of a participative organisational climate and self-leadership are directly and positively related with employees’ innovative behaviour and job involvement, and that proactive personality moderates the relationship between participative organisational climate and innovative behaviour. Also, when subordinates are dedicated to their work and enthusiastic about it, they will be more likely to engage in proactive actions and to persist in it (Sonnentag, 2003). Being able to take part in the decision-making process has a good chance of leading to more dedication and inclusion to their work, hence they will become more proactive when there is a higher level of participative leadership involved.
This research will look at the main effect of participative leadership on subordinates’ proactive behaviour. Thus, this leads to the first hypothesis. H1: Participative leadership has a
positive effect on subordinates’ proactivity.
As no two subordinates are identical, there are additional factors that need to be taken into account. One of those factors is the personality of the subordinate. Different personality traits may lead to different actions and consequences, and therefore may affect the relationship between participative leadership and subordinate proactivity. This relationship will be moderated by the degree of subordinate extraversion. Extraversion is one of the Big Five personality traits (Goldberg, 1990). Watson and Clark (1997) describe extraverts as people that are more sociable, but are also described as being more active and impulsive, less dysphoric, and less introspective and
emotions, and that extraverts are more likely to take on leadership roles and tend to have a greater number of close friends (Watson & Clark, 1997). Extraverts are also described as being assertive, action-oriented, engaging and seeking novelty and excitement (Cherry, 2018). It would make sense that extraversion enhances the relationship between participative leadership and proactive behaviour, since individuals with a higher level of extraversion would tend to voice their opinions more easily and encourage others to voice their opinions, given the traits and definitions of extraversion. They would also contribute to decision-making based on what is best for the organisation, since they do not tend to be introspective and self-preoccupied. For this reason, extraversion is the variable that would make the relationship between participative leadership and proactive behaviour stronger.
This leads to the second hypothesis of this research. H2: The relationship between
participative leadership and subordinate proactivity will be moderated by subordinate extraversion such that participative leadership will be stronger related to subordinate proactivity when
subordinate extraversion is high.
Conceptual model
These two hypotheses lead to the following conceptual model.
Method
Participants were a total of 50 employees from two different supermarket chains and a media company in the Netherlands, who were sent a survey to fill out. The survey was in Dutch, so participants needed to master the Dutch language. A total of 11 people who were asked to fill out the survey did not. This means that there was a response rate of 81.9%. The average age was 22.9
Participative leadership Subordinate proactivity
years. 66% of the respondents was male and 34% was female. 26% of the respondents indicated to have worked at their organisation for less than a year, 66% between one and five years, 6% between five and ten years and 2% between 10 and 15 years. 76% of the respondents indicated to be working part-time, while 24% worked full-time.
All leaders and followers were sent a link to fill out a survey about leadership and follower behaviour, hence there was made no distinction between respondents beforehand. These surveys included questions for multiple studies with different purposes. Leaders and followers both got a different survey. The follower survey consisted of a series of questions on the leader’s leadership style, questions about the follower’s personality and how they would behave in certain situations, with several demographic questions at the end. The leader survey consisted only of questions about their own personality and their ways of behaving in hypothetical situations, with the same
demographic questions at the end. Apart from the open-ended and multiple choice demographic questions, all questions were answered with a Likert-type metric with five intervals that were as follows: “1 – strongly disagree, 2 – disagree, 3 – neutral, 4 – agree, 5 – strongly agree.” For this study, only the follower survey is relevant. One respondent was left out as they filled in an age of 8.
Participative leadership was measured with 6 items from the participative decision-making subscale of the empowering leadership questionnaire by Arnold et al. (2000) using the 5-point Likert scale. Examples of questions were “Does this leader encourage employees to express their ideas or suggestions?” and “Does this leader consider employees’ ideas when he or she disagrees with them?” The question “Does this leader make decisions based only on his or her own ideas?” was computed into a separate variable with a reversed scale. Cronbach’s alpha for this variable was 0.855 which, by rule of thumb, meant that the scale was reliable.
In order to measure proactive behaviour of the followers, the organisational proactive behaviours subscale of the proactive behaviour scale by Kanten and Alparslan (n.d.) was used, which contained 6 items. Examples of questions were “Do I suggest ideas or solutions for company
The 5-point Likert scale was used for this set of questions as well. This scale also turned out to be reliable, with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.889.
The Revised Hexaco Personality Inventory measures all personality traits of the Big Five personality traits model, but was used to only measure follower extraversion, with a total of 16 items, also using the 5-point Likert scale. The questions for extraversion measured four categories: social self-esteem, social boldness, sociability and liveliness. Examples of questions were “Do I feel reasonably satisfied with myself overall?” and “In social situations, am I usually the one who makes the first move?” 7 questions were computed into separate variables with a reversed scale. Those questions were: “Do I feel that I am an unpopular person?”; “Do I sometimes feel that I am a worthless person?”; “Do I rarely express my opinions in group meetings?”; “Do I tend to feel quite self-conscious when speaking in front of a group of people?”; “Do I avoid making small talk with people?”; “Do people often tell me that I should try to cheer up?” and “Are most people more upbeat and dynamic than I generally am?”. This scale also turned out to be reliable with Cronbach’s alpha being 0.824.
Analysis
All the data was put into IBM SPSS Statistics. All of the questions and their respective responses were put in as separate variables. I then assessed whether the scales were reliable by calculating Cronbach’s alpha for participative leadership, proactive behaviour an extraversion. Next, I computed the variables participative leadership, proactive behaviour and extraversion by taking the mean of their respective question sets. Before testing my hypotheses, I checked the assumptions that have to be met to perform a linear regression. Firstly, I checked whether the data was normally distributed using a Normal P-P Plot of Regression Standardised Residual, which turned out to be the case. I then checked for homoscedasticity using a scatterplot, which was also met for this data set. Finally, I checked for an absence of multicollinearity. This assumption was met with a variance inflation factor value of 1. Since these three assumptions were met, I went on to test my hypotheses
using linear regressions, with participative leadership as the independent variable, proactive
behaviour as the dependent variable, and extraversion as the moderator variable. The entire survey can be found in the appendix.
Results
Table 1. Descriptive statistics and correlations
M (a) SD (b) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
1. Gender (c) 0.34 0.48
2. Age 22.9 6.04 0.231
3. Part-time/Full-time (d) 0.24 0.43 0.091 0.268
4. Tenure (e) 0.84 0.62 0.188 0.400** -0.159
5. Tenure with leader (f) 0.58 0.61 0.150 0.216 0.081 0.631** 6. Participative leadership 3.58 0.80 -0.028 0.159 0.230 0.040 -0.154
7. Extraversion 3.52 0.48 0.036 0.022 0.138 0.047 0.100 -0.042
8. Proactive behaviour 2.99 0.84 0.026 0.160 0.072 0.285* 0.005 0.170 0.023 ** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).
* Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). (a) M = mean.
(b) SD = standard deviation. (c) 0 = male, 1 = female. (d) 0 = part-time, 1 = full-time.
(e)(f) 0 = less than 1 year, 1 = 1-5 years, 2 = 5-10 years, 3 = 10-15 years, 4 = longer than 15 years.
Table 1 shows the mean, standard deviation, and correlations for the demographic questions and the moderator, independent and dependent variable. As may be seen, tenure within the organisation is positively correlated with age. This means that the two are associated, not necessarily that one is a causation of the other. However, it seems logical that respondents with a higher age are more likely to have a longer tenure within the organisation. Especially in supermarkets, employers have become more unlikely to give their employees a permanent contract, as there are a lot of youngsters applying for supermarket jobs. Employees of higher age would in that case have received a permanent
correlation is between tenure and tenure together with the corresponding leader. This does make sense, since employees with a longer tenure are more likely to have worked together with a leader for a longer period of time. New employees obviously would not have worked together with a leader for very long.
With regards to the variables of interest for this study, proactive behaviour has a significant positive correlation with tenure. This could be because having worked within an organisation for a longer period of time might lead to a higher feeling of commitment towards the organisation, and therefore a higher level of proactive behaviour. Interestingly, extraversion has a negative, though very weak, correlation with participative leadership. What this means is that respondents with a higher level of personal sense of extraversion, generally perceived little to no participative
leadership. Whether that is because of the leader’s style of leadership or because of the employee’s extraversion is unclear. Proactive behaviour is positively correlated with participative leadership. The correlation is less than moderate but still interesting. This corresponds with my expectations. I believe that employees who are subject to participative leadership will, either short-term or in the long run, feel a higher level of commitment or dedication towards their job, and therefore show more proactive behaviour.
Table 2. Model Summary
R R Square Adjusted R Square Std. Error of the
Estimate
0.170 (a) 0.029 0.009 0.83780
a. Predictors: (Constant), Participative_Leadership
Performing a linear regression analysis led to Table 2, 3 and 4. In this linear regression, participative leadership acted as the independent variable, and proactive behaviour as the
dependent variable. Table 2 indicates how much of the results can be explained by the model. Table 3 reports how well the regression equation predicts proactive behaviour and Table 4 shows us the coefficients. As can be seen from Table 2, R equals 0.170. This denotes the correlation between predicted and observed proactive behaviour. Since this is not a very high correlation, the model does
somewhat predict proactive behaviour, but not very precisely. R square equals 0.029, which means that only 2.9% of the variance in proactive behaviour can be explained by the predictor participative leadership. This regression only maximises R square for this sample, so for the entire population it will be slightly lower. The adjusted R square accounts for this shrinkage by estimating the population R square for this model and gives a more realistic indication of how well proactive behaviour can generally be predicted.
Table 3. ANOVA (a)
Sum of Squares
df Mean Square F Sig.
Regression 0.998 1 0.998 1.422 0.239 (b)
Residual 33.692 48 0.702
Total 34.689 49
a. Dependent Variable: Proactive_Behaviour b. Predictors: (Constant), Participative_Leadership
As can be seen from Table 3, the p-value in this case is 0.239, which is higher than 0.05 and therefore, by rule of thumb, means that the regression model does not statistically predict proactive behaviour.
Table 4. Coefficients (a)
Unstandardised B Coefficients Std. Error Standardised Coefficients Beta t Sig. (Constant) 2.348 0.551 4.262 0.000 Participative_Leadership 0.179 0.150 0.170 1.192 0.239
a. Dependent Variable: Proactive_Behaviour
The B coefficients in Table 4 indicate how many units proactive behaviour increases for a single unit increase in participative leadership. Table 4 shows the same significance level for the predictor participative leadership as Table 3, which is 0.239, and therefore tells us that the B coefficient is statistically insignificant. All in all, we can say that there is not enough evidence to support H1.
Now this does not mean that there cannot be an interaction effect. My second hypothesis was that that the relationship between participative leadership and proactive behaviour would be moderated by extraversion. I have tested for the interaction effect by creating three new variables in
SPSS. I have computed mean-centre variables for participative leadership and extraversion, by subtracting the mean for each variable from its old values. This was done to reduce the problem of multicollinearity in the regression equation. I then computed an interaction variable by multiplying both mean-centred with each other. Those three variables were put into a linear regression model. Table 5. Model Summary
Model R R Square Adjusted R Square Std. Error of the Estimate
1 0.172 (a) 0.030 -0.012 0.84628
2. 0.250 (b) 0.062 0.001 0.84091
a. Predictors: (Constant), PL_Mean_Centred, Ex_Mean_Centred
b. Predictors: (Constant), PL_Mean_Centred, Ex_Mean_Centred, Interaction_PL_Ex
As can be seen from Table 5, the model indicates that there is indeed an interaction. The R square change is 0.032 which, even though it is a small percentage of 3.2%, is nearly half of the variance accounted for by the model.
Table 6. Coefficients (a)
Model Unstandardised B Coefficients
Std. Error Standardised Coefficients Beta T Sig. 1 (Constant) 2.990 0.120 24.983 0.000 Ex_Mean_Centred 0.052 0.252 0.030 0.207 0.837 PL_Mean_Centred 0.181 0.152 0.171 1.188 0.241 2 (Constant) 2.996 0.119 25.173 0.000 Ex_Mean_Centred 0.218 0.282 0.124 0.771 0.445 PL_Mean_Centred 0.111 0.161 0.105 0.692 0.493 Interaction_PL_Ex 0.382 0.302 0.215 1.266 0.212
To check whether the interaction is significant, I looked at the coefficients in Table 6. As can be seen from the bottom row in, the p-value for the interaction between participative leadership and extraversion with regards to proactive behaviour is 0.212. This is bigger than 0.05 and thus, we can state that the interaction effect is not significant, and H2 is not supported.
Figure 2. Interaction slopes
Even though the interaction turned out to be statistically insignificant, I plotted the independent variable and the moderator variable nevertheless, to inspect whether the pattern was in the
expected direction. As may be seen from Figure 2, in most cases, people with high extraversion score slightly higher on proactive behaviour than people with low extraversion, but they do not differ much. There is also only a slight difference between low perceived participative leadership and high perceived participative leadership,
Discussion
I started this research because there was inadequate extant research about how personality traits can affect the relationship between participative leadership and proactive subordinate
behaviour. It was already shown that both the team and organisational level can play an important role in developing subordinate proactivity, but that different levels of leadership are likely to affect proactive behaviour in different ways (Strauss et al., 2009). Furthermore, participative leadership had already been shown to be positively related to subordinates’ proactive service performance (Rank et al., 2007). This is the reason why I was keen to find out whether the same could be said about subordinates’ organisational proactive behaviour. I believed that extraversion could best explain this relationship out of the Big Five personality traits model. I predicted that the effect of participative leadership on subordinate proactivity would by higher if the degree of subordinate extraversion was high, since the characteristics of extraversion had the best correspondence to those of proactivity. This led to two hypotheses: participative leadership has a positive effect on subordinates’ proactivity and that the relationship between participative leadership and that subordinate proactivity would be moderated by subordinate extraversion, such that participative leadership will be stronger related to subordinate proactivity when subordinate extraversion is high. To test these hypotheses, I sent out surveys, checked for reliability and analysed the results in SPSS, looking at correlations and
regressions.
Contrary to the expectations, participative leadership did not appear to have a statistically significant relationship with proactive behaviour. The most plausible explanation for this, is that subordinates may not feel like they need to show proactivity for their leader to notice their performance, since they are already included in the decision-making process anyway. This
insignificant relationship contradicts current literature. For example, Frese, Kring, Soose and Zempel (1996) have stated that participative leadership is linked to proactivity. Moreover, Taştan (2013) has found that all aspects of a participative organisational climate and self-leadership are directly and positively related with employees’ innovative behaviour and job involvement, and that proactive
personality moderates the relationship between participative organisational climate and innovative behaviour. There are several other theories that could explain why the results of this study are not in line with extant research. One of them is that if employees are included in the decision-making process, but the issue at hand is one that is of insignificance to said employees, or they bluntly do not care about that particular issue, the participative leadership style would have no effect on the
subordinates’ proactive behaviour. There would in this case be no incentive for them to be proactive. Also, employees may likely not get to choose what issues are going to be discussed to be made decisions about. If subordinates’ more pressing concerns are not being addressed, there is a high chance that even though they get included in the decision-making process, this will not lead to them being showing more proactive behaviour.
The second important result was that extraversion was not a moderator for the relationship between participative leadership and proactive subordinate behaviour. This is not in line with what I had originally expected. However, after looking at the correlations of all the variables, it showed that extraversion and participative leadership were negatively correlated. The most probable explanation for the lack of significant interaction, and the presence of a negative correlation, is that extraversion simply is not a suitable variable to strengthen the relationship between the dependent and
independent variable. Introversion may show a clearer interaction between participative leadership and proactive behaviour instead. Since extraversion already shares many traits with proactive individuals, this may lead to a negative effect instead. Another possible explanation is that
employees were only asked questions regarding organisational proactive behaviours, while questions with regards to co-workers oriented and individual proactive behaviour were left out. In this case, a high degree of extraversion may not have as big an impact on organisational proactive behaviours, which mostly have to do with coming up with ideas or solutions for company problems, instituting new work methods and trying to change procedures or policies in order to contribute to
organisational goals, than it would have for the other two types of proactive behaviours. Co-workers oriented proactive behaviours have to do with encouraging co-workers to speak up, spending time
and effort on social networking, and speaking up about opinions. Individual proactive behaviours include trying to learn new knowledge, taking on specific tasks, learning new approaches and willingness to seek feedback. Extraversion may have a bigger influence on these two forms of proactive behaviours than the one I researched.
There are several limitations to this study. Only two different types of organisations were analysed: a supermarket and a media company. It is understandable that, especially in the case of the former, that participative leadership is not a leadership style that is widely used. The likeliness of a participative leadership style being used would be higher at higher levels within the company where organisation-wide decisions are made, as opposed to in the actual stores. Secondly, in this study only organisational proactive behaviour is analysed which is likely not relevant in a
supermarket setting, or a media company for that matter. Furthermore, the sample size of 50 is not optimal. Having a bigger sample size would have given more reliable results. Additionally, as
mentioned in the discussion, almost none of the respondents had been working at their organisation for longer than 5 years, which could have an influence on how much participative leadership is perceived.
In order to conduct further research about this topic, a bigger and more diverse sample size could be used, with respondents from a bigger variety of organisations. Since this study has
contradicted many of the initial predictions and extant literature, it may be wise to make some changes to the variables being analysed. Depending on the type of work setting being analysed, it may be a good idea to look at empowering leadership as opposed to participative leadership.
Empowering leadership involves sharing power with a view toward enhancing employees’ motivation and investment in their work (Kirkman & Rosen, 1997; Thomas & Velthouse, 1990). Also, one could take a different subscale for proactive behaviour, or include the entire scale instead, depending on the research question and hypotheses. Another variable that could be looked at when choosing proactive behaviour as the dependent variable is intrinsic motivation and work engagement. Intrinsic motivation is one of the most important motivational mechanisms that are associated with individual
innovation (Amabile, 1985, 1988; Janssen & Van Yperen, 2004). Work engagement has already been shown to fully mediate the impact of job resources on proactive behaviour (Salanova & Schaufeli, 2008) and thus could play a role when analysing leadership styles and proactive behaviour.
In terms of practical implications, my research has shown that even though leaders may include subordinates in the decision-making process, there still needs to be enough incentive, perhaps from another source than being allowed to contribute to decisions, in order for employees to show a higher degree of proactive behaviour. It is still unclear how extraversion plays a role when it comes to leadership styles and proactive behaviour. For future research, the same study could be performed, but with introversion as a moderator variable instead. Factors such as tenure should also be taken into account when analysing this relationship. A different moderator that could be used for future research is psychological empowerment. Pieterse, Van Knippenberg, Schippers and Stam (2010) have already looked at psychological empowerment as a moderator for transformational and transactional leadership on innovative behaviour, so perhaps this moderator variable could be used to look at participative leadership and proactive behaviour as well. Moreover, empowering
employees and increasing their autonomy is linked to proactive behaviour (Frese, Kring, Soose & Zempel, 1996). Finally, Knol and Van Linge (2009) have shown that both structural and psychological empowerment is statistically significantly related to innovative behaviour.
To conclude, this research could function as a base for future research, since both
hypotheses were not supported in this study. Extant literature had proven differently and had led to different expectations than the obtained results, which makes it an interesting topic to find out more about.
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Appendix
Survey (only the questions with relevance to this study have been included)
Participative leadership
1. Deze leider spoort medewerkers aan hun ideeën of suggesties te uiten. 2. Deze leider luistert naar de ideeën en suggesties van medewerkers.
3. Deze leider gebruikt de suggesties van medewerkers om beslissingen te maken die invloed hebben op ons.
4. Deze leider geeft alle medewerkers een kans om hun mening te uiten.
5. Deze leider overweegt ideeën van medewerkers wanneer hij/zij het ermee oneens is.
6. Deze leider maakt beslissen die slechts gebaseerd zijn op zijn/haar eigen ideeën.
Extraversion
7. Alles bij elkaar heb ik wel een tevreden gevoel over mijzelf.
8. Ik denk dat de meeste mensen sommige aspecten van mijn persoonlijkheid wel mogen.
9. Ik heb het gevoel dat ik een impopulair persoon ben. 10. Soms heb ik het gevoel dat ik een waardeloos persoon ben. 11. Ik geef zelden mijn mening in groepsbijeenkomsten.
12. Als ik anderen ontmoet, ben ik meestal diegene die het contact op gang brengt. 13. Als ik met andere mensen samen ben, ben ik vaak de woordvoerder van de groep.
14. Ik voel mijzelf niet erg op mijn gemak als ik voor een groep mensen sta te praten. 15. Ik vermijd prietpraat (kletspraat).
16. Ik geniet er van om veel mensen om me heen te hebben met wie ik kan praten.
17. Ik heb een baan waarin men veel met andere mensen omgaat dan één waarin men alleen dient te werken.
18. Het eerste dat ik altijd doe als ik ergens nieuw ben, is vrienden maken. 19. Ik heb vrijwel altijd veel energie.
20. De meeste dagen voel ik me blij en optimistisch.
21. Mensen vertellen me vaak dat ik wat vrolijker zou moeten zijn.
22. De meeste mensen zijn levenslustiger en dynamischer dan ik over het algemeen ben.
Proactive behaviour
23. Ik suggereer ideeën voor oplossingen van bedrijfsproblemen.
24. Ik probeer nieuwe werkmethoden te introduceren die effectiever zijn voor het bedrijf. 25. Ik heb overwogen om te proberen werkmethodes te verbeteren.
26. Ik verander procedures die niet overeenkomen met, of bijdragen aan, de doelen van het bedrijf.
27. Ik probeer beleid dat juist niet effectief of productief is voor het bedrijf te veranderen. 28. Ik geef mijn meningen wanneer dit nuttig kan zijn voor het bedrijf.
Demographic questions
29. Welke code hebt u ontvangen? 30. Wat is uw geslacht?
31. Wat is uw leeftijd?
32. Werkt u part-time of full-time? 33. Hoe lang bent u al in dienst?
