Positive personality traits and self-leadership in sustainable organizations: Mediating influence of thriving and moderating role of proactive personality

Self-leadership is a self-influence perspective that pertains to one's own ability to manage, lead and control personal behaviors and come up with strategies to achieve desired goals for sustainable competitive advantages. Prior research has found positive associations between self-leadership and a variety of individual and organizational outcomes. Yet, very little work has investigated the role of personality traits as possible antecedents of self-leadership. Hence, the primary goal of our study is to investigate several of these antecedents in a non-Western context with the goal of further clarifying this valuable topic. We also test whether this relationship is mediated by thriving at work and moderated by proactive personality. Data was collected in two time waves to minimize common method bias from 245 employees working in different public and private sector firms by utilizing survey methodology. We tested our hypothesized model with the help of Hayes' PROCESS macro. We found that hopeful and optimistic employees are more likely to thrive at work through the better experience of learning and vitality. This, in turn, boost a person's self confidence that driving to set stretch goals which allow them to develop self-leadership abilities. It is also found that the positive linkage between the hope and self-leadership is stronger for employees higher on proactive personality than for employees with lower proactive personality. (C) 2020 Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.