The role of permission in the employee proactivity process

Abstract

The predominant view in the employee proactivity literature highlights the importance of personality as well as a trio of agentic forces—namely, “can do,” “reason to,” and “energized to” motivation—that drive employee proactive behavior. Complementing existing theoretical frameworks, we introduce the concept of proactivity permission, defined as an employee’s tacit perception of the extent to which they are “allowed to” perform proactive behaviors at work. In this article, we investigate the psychological experience of proactivity permission. Directly drawn from the dominance theory of deontic reasoning, we model a set of individual (employee status, psychological entitlement), relational (leader–member exchange), and group-level predictors (organizational rule consistency, normative tightness) of proactivity permission and demonstrate the construct’s value in predicting proactive behavior over and above many well-established antecedents from the literature. In a field study of 388 employees and 110 supervisors in 35 organizations, we found support for our predictions. We discuss implications of our work for the literature on employee behavior and proactive work behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)