In the current competitive environment of the workplace, companies are increasingly emphasizing employee initiative, but this emphasis has also had a significant impact on work-family relationships. The study of proactive personality in the field of work-family relationship is an important research hotspot, which has aroused extensive academic attention in the past decades. It is characterized by employees' ability to adapt, actively move things forward, and seek out opportunities at work, as well as by a positive attitude toward dealing with challenges in work-family interactions. Relevant research suggests that employees high in proactive personality traits achieve success at work while also significantly impacting work-family relationships, which can result in both positive facilitation and negative resource depletion issues. Although previous research has confirmed the positive effects of proactive personality on workfamily gain, the exploration of how it affects work-family conflict specifically through resource gain and loss is incomplete, and in-depth research is needed, particularly with regard to the dual effects of resource gain and loss on the relationship, and how proactive personality can trigger conflict.
The purpose of this study is to analyze how proactive personality affects an individual's work-family relationship through resource changes and to explore the moderating mechanism of empowered leadership in this complex interaction process. Based on the previous literature review and related theories, this study constructed a mediation model with moderation and proposed a series of research hypotheses. The Active Personality Inventory, the Resource Conservation Scale, the Work-Family Interface Scale, and the Empowering Leadership Style Scale were selected as the assessment tools, and the questionnaires were administered and the data were collected through an online platform. In this study, 415 valid questionnaires were firstly obtained for all the study variables through simultaneous sampling; the second round of questionnaires containing only the mediator and outcome variables was administered to these 415 participants about 2 months later, and 225 two-stage data were obtained after matching with the first round of data.
The results of the analyses based on both the concurrent sampling data and the two-stage matched data indicated that (1) proactive personality was significantly and positively related to resource acquisition, and resource acquisition was significantly and positively related to work-family gain; (2) resource acquisition mediated proactive personality's impact on work-family gain; and (3) empowered leadership had a positive moderating effect on the relationship between proactive personality and resource acquisition, and reinforced the positive effect of resource acquisition in the mediating role of proactive personality in influencing work-family gains; (4) proactive personality was significantly negatively related to resource loss; resource loss was significantly positively related to work-family conflict; and (5) resource loss mediated the negative effect of proactive personality on work-family conflict. In addition, the analysis based on the results of the concurrently sampled data also indicated that authorized leadership had a negative moderating effect on the relationship between proactive personality and resource loss, and reinforced the mediating role of resource loss in proactive personality and work-family conflict.
This study is of theoretical and practical significance for supplementing and refining the existing theory and practice of proactive personality and work-family relationships.
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