Proactive personality and career success.

Scott E. Seibert, J. Michael Crant, Maria L. Kraimer·1999·Journal of Applied Psychology

Abstract

This study examined the relationship between proactive personality and career success by surveying a sample of 496 employees (320 men and 176 women) from a diverse set of occupations and organizations. Proactive personality was positively associated with both self-reported objective (salary and promotions) and subjective (career satisfaction) indicators of career success. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that proactive personality explained additional variance in both objective and subjective career success even after controlling for several relevant variables (demographic, human capital, motivational, organizational, and industry) that have previously been found to be predictive of career outcomes. These findings were consistent using both self-report and significant--other ratings of proactive personality.

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Cited by (32)

  1. When Work and Family are Allies: A Theory of Work-Family Enrichment
    Greenhaus, Jeffrey H., Powell, Gary N. · 2006 · Academy of Management Review
  2. Proactive Behavior in Organizations
    Crant, J. Michael · 2000 · Journal of Management
  3. PREDICTORS OF OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE CAREER SUCCESS: A META‐ANALYSIS
    NG, THOMAS W. H., EBY, LILLIAN T., SORENSEN, KELLY L., FELDMAN, DANIEL C. · 2005 · Personnel Psychology
  4. The dynamics of proactivity at work
    Grant, Adam M., Ashford, Susan J. · 2008 · Research in Organizational Behavior
  5. Modeling the antecedents of proactive behavior at work.
    Parker, Sharon K., Williams, Helen M., Turner, Nick · 2006 · Journal of Applied Psychology

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How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Proactive personality and career success. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1037//0021-9010.84.3.416
The paper
Seibert, S. E., Crant, J. M., & Kraimer, M. L. (1999). Proactive personality and career success. Journal of Applied Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037//0021-9010.84.3.416

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.