Proactivity at Work: Beyond Just Taking Initiative

Do they really want it?

There is a peculiar tension at the heart of modern working life: organisations routinely list “proactivity” or “initiative” as desirable traits in job adverts, competency frameworks, and performance reviews, yet the same organisations frequently build cultures, hierarchies, and management systems that punish the very behaviour they claim to want.

This article explores what proactivity is, why it matters, and why fostering it is considerably more complicated than most leadership programmes would have you believe.

What Proactive Behaviour Actually Is

If you ask most people what it means to be proactive at work, you will get some variation of “doing things without being asked” or “being a self-starter.”

While these descriptions are not wrong, they are incomplete. The academic literature defines proactive behaviour as self-directed and future-focused action that aims to change and improve either the situation or oneself. Proactivity is not simply about being busy or enthusiastic. It is about anticipation, about scanning the horizon for problems that have not yet arrived and opportunities that have not yet been exploited.

One useful framework for proactivity describes it as a process with three core components:

• Anticipating (looking ahead),
• Planning (deciding how to act), and
• Striving to bring about change.

Here proactivity is not a single behaviour, but a way of engaging with work that can be applied in different domains, from how people manage their careers to how they voice concerns to how they redesign their own roles. Other writers on feedback have made similar points too, positioning proactive behaviour as a broad construct encompassing everything from feedback-seeking to issue-selling to career management.

What separates these descriptions from mere conscientiousness or diligence is the orientation towards change. A conscientious employee does their job well. A proactive employee tries to change what “their job” means.

The Research Foundations

Our own interest in proactivity came about because a friend of ours, Joanne Gray, wrote a book on the subject : “Powering Workplace Productivity“. She’s one of many authors to have tackled the subject. It’s worth exploring some of the approached people have taken to writing about this subject, as they provide some foundations to our understanding.

Proactive personality. Bateman and Crant (1993) were among the first to conceptualise proactivity as a stable individual difference. Their “proactive personality” scale measures the extent to which people see themselves as agents of change, relatively unconstrained by situational forces. People who score highly tend to identify opportunities, show initiative, take action, and persist until meaningful change occurs. This dispositional approach has been enormously influential, though it does carry the risk of implying that proactivity is something people either have or lack (thus perhaps that it is something that cannot be learned).

Personal initiative. Frese and Fay (2001) developed the concept of personal initiative, which they defined as work behaviour characterised by its self-starting nature, its proactive approach, and its persistence in overcoming barriers. What distinguishes their work is the emphasis on persistence. In their formulation, it is not enough to have a good idea or even to act on it; genuine personal initiative requires continuing to push when things become difficult, when resources dry up, or when colleagues are indifferent.

I’m sure we’ve all met and worked with people who are great at coming up with ideas and acting on them, but who struggle to keep going when the going gets tough. The research suggests people like this are not that unusual.

Job crafting. Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001) offered a different lens entirely with their concept of job crafting, the process by which employees proactively alter the boundaries of their tasks, their relationships at work, or the cognitive framing of their role. This is proactivity directed inward, reshaping one’s own experience of work rather than changing the external environment. It is a subtler form of agency, but no less significant, and it helps explain why two people in ostensibly identical roles can have radically different experiences of meaning and engagement.

We like linking this to proactivity itself. It’s a bit meta. Perhaps it’s hard to be proactive in our role, so let’s be proactive with our role and shape a better role for who we are, perhaps one in which we are more motivated and able to be proactive within.

Why Organisations Value Proactivity (And Why Sometimes They Don’t)

The business case for proactive behaviour is, on the surface, straightforward. Proactive employees anticipate problems before they escalate, identify efficiencies that no one asked them to find, and contribute to innovation by challenging existing assumptions. In environments characterised by uncertainty and rapid change, having people who can think ahead and act without waiting for instructions is obviously advantageous. As mentioned above, proactive people are also able to push forward with their agency, even when things are tough.

But there is an uncomfortable flip side to this positive framing. It’s that proactivity is inherently disruptive. A genuinely proactive employee does not simply execute the strategy more efficiently; they question whether the strategy is right. Or perhaps they just decide it isn’t right and independently push to change it. They raise problems that management might prefer to ignore. They propose changes to systems that powerful people built and are invested in. In our experience, the organisations that struggle most with proactivity are not the ones that lack proactive individuals, but the ones whose structures and cultures systematically discourage the behaviour while simultaneously claiming to value it. Similarly, the leaders or managers who struggle the most with proactive individuals, are those that struggle to let go of control and get out of the way of their employees. 

These types of challenges are particularly visible in hierarchical or command-and-control cultures, where proactivity can be read as insubordination, as failing to “stay in your lane.” We have seen talented and inherently proactive people learn, often through painful experience, that the organisation’s stated desire for initiative has invisible boundaries that no one will articulate until they are crossed. We’ll say we want proactivity, but if you actually do too much of it, we’ll make things painful for you.

The Conditions That Enable or Suppress Proactivity

There are several key antecedents of proactive behaviour. Three conditions stand out as particularly important:

Psychological safety. People are far more likely to engage in proactive behaviour when they believe they will not be punished for speaking up, making suggestions, or trying something new that might fail. This is not about creating a comfortable environment where no one is ever challenged, it is about creating one where the costs of initiative are not catastrophically high. Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety intersects directly with the proactivity literature here: if people fear that raising a concern will be career-limiting, they will simply stop raising concerns.

Autonomy. Proactive behaviour requires a degree of discretion over how one does one’s work. When every task is prescribed, every process mandated, and every deviation flagged, there is simply no space for proactivity to emerge. This creates a paradox for organisations that want proactive people but also want standardised processes, tight controls, and predictable outputs. Both desires are legitimate, but they are in tension, and pretending otherwise does not resolve the contradiction.

Leadership style. Leaders who model proactive behaviour, who actively seek feedback, who admit uncertainty, and who respond to initiative with curiosity rather than defensiveness, tend to cultivate it in their teams. Conversely, leaders who micromanage, who respond to unsolicited suggestions with irritation, or who treat any deviation from plan as a failure create environments where learned helplessness is the rational response.

Proactivity Isn’t All Good

Proactivity is not an unqualified good. Like most behavioural constructs, it has some negative aspects worth consideration.

Overreach and political naivety. Proactive employees who lack political awareness can create significant problems for themselves and others. Proposing a radical restructuring of a process without understanding who is invested in the current arrangement, or escalating a concern without appreciating the timing and context, can transform a well-intentioned initiative into a career-damaging misstep.

The success of proactive behaviour depends heavily on how it is perceived by others, and perception is shaped by factors far beyond the quality of the idea itself: timing, relationships, framing, and organisational politics all play a role.

Burnout risk. There is a real danger that proactive individuals, particularly those high in personal initiative, will take on too much. If you are the person who always spots the problem and always feels compelled to act, the cumulative burden can become unsustainable. The persistence component of personal initiative can tip into stubbornness or self-sacrifice when the organisational environment is not supportive.

We have worked with highly proactive individuals who burned out precisely because their organisations were happy to benefit from their initiative but unwilling to resource or recognise it. We see this as a common, specific risk in the third sector which is often also highly purpose and impact driven, and lacking in resources.

Undermining collaboration. In team environments, excessive or poorly calibrated proactivity from one individual can crowd out others’ contributions, create resentment, or fragment collective effort. The person who always has the idea, always volunteers, and always drives the agenda may be genuinely trying to help (or they may not), but the effect on team dynamics can be corrosive if it is not managed thoughtfully. This kinds of leads up back to psychological safety and emotional intelligence, as these overly-assertive proactive behaviours can inhibit others and reduce psychological safety within the team.

Practical Implications for Leaders

The research suggests several practical considerations for leaders who genuinely want to foster proactivity:

• Audit the gap between rhetoric and reality. If your organisation says it values initiative, test that claim honestly. What actually happens when someone proposes a change that challenges the status quo? What happens when a proactive effort fails? The answers to these questions reveal your true culture far more reliably than any values statement.
• Create genuine psychological safety. This does not mean avoiding difficult conversations or lowering standards. It means ensuring that people can take interpersonal risks, such as raising concerns, admitting mistakes, or proposing unorthodox solutions, without fear of humiliation or retribution.
• Provide autonomy with clarity. People need enough freedom to exercise judgement and enough structure to know where the boundaries are. Ambiguity about expectations is not the same as autonomy; it is simply confusion dressed up as empowerment.
• Develop political literacy alongside proactivity. If you are encouraging people to be more proactive, equip them with the skills to navigate organisational politics, to read the room, to build coalitions, and to frame their initiatives in ways that account for stakeholder interests. Initiative without influence is just noise.
• Watch for burnout in your most proactive people. They are often the last to ask for help and the first to take on more. Check in with them. Resource their initiatives. And be honest when an idea, however well-intentioned, is not going to be pursued, rather than letting them invest energy in something that was never going to happen.

Learning More

You might enjoy reading more about these topics:

• Circle of Influence – Focusing on what you can control or influence
• Employee Engagement In The World Of Work
• Self Awareness In The World of Work
• Intentional Change Theory
• Flow – Moments of Optimal Experience

The People Shift View

Proactivity is one of those concepts that has been so thoroughly absorbed into corporate vocabulary that it has lost much of its meaning. Everyone “values initiative,” until someone actually takes it. We’ve been there ourselves, both as the person taking initiative and as a the manager in whose team someone has taken too much initiative. Both situations are uncomfortable and can lead to some resentment.

We believe that fostering proactivity is fundamentally a leadership challenge, not a recruitment one. You cannot simply hire proactive people and expect the environment to take care of itself. The conditions matter enormously: the safety to speak, the autonomy to act, the support to persist, and the honesty to acknowledge when things go wrong. Without those conditions, even the most naturally proactive individuals will eventually learn to keep their heads down. And that is a loss, not just for them, but for every organisation that could have benefited from their willingness to think ahead and act on what they see.

If you are a leader reading this, the question worth sitting with is not “how do I get my people to be more proactive?” but rather “what am I doing, perhaps unconsciously, that makes proactivity feel unsafe?” The answer is almost always more revealing than you expect. And, like so much we cover, we think that leaders need to develop as people to be better able to navigate these situations effectively.