What makes employees more proactive? Roles of job embeddedness, the perceived strength of the HRM system and empowering leadership

Drawing on the theory of planned behavior, the current study examined the effects of employees’ job embeddedness and the perceived strength of the human resource management (HRM) system on their proactive work behaviors, as well as the moderation effect of empowering leadership on these relationships. We tested our hypotheses using data collected from 206 Chinese employees in a three-wave survey. The results demonstrated the positive effects of both job embeddedness and the perceived strength of the HRM system on employees’ proactive work behaviors. We also found that the relationship between the perceived strength of the HRM system and proactive work behaviors was stronger when the levels of empowering leadership were high rather than low. However, the moderation effect of empowering leadership on the relationship between job embeddedness and proactive work behaviors was not significant. Our study contributes to the understanding of the antecedents of Chinese employees’ proactive work behaviors from the perspective of motivation and behavioral control.