Starting a Proactive Workday by Reattaching to Work: How Reattachment and Supervisor Support for Self-Management Prompt Daily Proactivity

Abstract

Proactive behavior is important in today's organizations. To mobilize psychological resources needed for proactive motivation, employees benefit from reattaching to work at the start of the workday. Reattaching to work is a daily mental process that enables employees to transition smoothly between nonwork and work periods. Integrating the literatures on proactivity and reattachment, we develop a model in which morning reattachment to work initiates employees' daily proactive behavior via proactive motivational states—high-activated positive affect (energized to motivation), autonomous motivation (reason to motivation), and organization-based self-esteem (can do motivation). We further identify perceived supervisor support for self-management as a cross-level moderating factor strengthening the association of reattachment with proactive motivational states and subsequently proactivity. Building through two 10-day experience sampling studies with Chinese (Study 1) and US (Study 2) samples, we found support for our model in which morning reattachment promoted high-activated positive affect and autonomous motivation and consequently led to more daily proactive behavior. Supervisor support for self-management strengthened the associations of reattachment with these proactive motivational states. We advance the research on proactivity by integrating the emerging literature on reattachment to work to delineate a process through which reattaching to work represents an effective cognitive strategy connecting nonwork and work periods to generate proactivity on a daily basis.