Confidence Matters: Self‐efficacy Moderates the Credit that Supervisors Give to Adaptive and Proactive Role Behaviours
| Date | 01 April 2017 |
| Author | Sharon K. Parker,Helena Nguyen,Anya Johnson,Catherine Collins |
| Published date | 01 April 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12149 |
British Journal of Management, Vol. 28, 315–330 (2017)
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12149
Confidence Matters: Self-ecacy
Moderates the Credit that Supervisors Give
to Adaptive and Proactive Role Behaviours
Helena Nguyen, Anya Johnson, Catherine Collins1and Sharon K. Parker2
The University of Sydney, Work and Organisational Studies, The University of Sydney Business School, H70,
Abercrombie Building, Sydney NSW 2006, Australia,1The University of New South Wales, School of
Management, UNSW Business School, Sydney NSW 2052, Australia, and 2The Universityof Western Australia,
UWABusiness School, M252, Perth, Western Australia 6009, Australia
Corresponding author email: helena.nguyen@sydney.edu.au
In complex and uncertain work environments,employees need to not only be proficient in
carrying out their core duties, but also to be adaptive (able to cope and respond to unpre-
dictable events) and proactive (able to anticipate the situation and act in a self-directed
way) in their work roles. In this study we investigate the extent to which supervisors ac-
tually give credit to adaptive and proactive role behaviours when they judge employees’
overall job performance. Drawing on attribution theory, we propose that the extent to
which these role behaviours are valued by supervisors will be enhanced by employees’
confidence for relevant role behaviours. Support for these ideas is provided using data
from junior doctors and their supervisors in a hospital emergency department. Adaptive
role behaviours positively influenced supervisors’ judgements of overall job performance.
This relationship was stronger for employees with high self-ecacy for achieving out-
comes. Engaging in proactiverole behaviours while also lacking role-breadth self-ecacy
resulted in supervisors’ giving employees less credit for their proactive role behaviours.
Findings support the argument that employees’ self-ecacy for specific role behaviours
provides attributional cues about capability that modify how adaptive and proactive role
behaviours are interpreted and valued.
Introduction
Jobperformance, typically assessed by supervisors,
is one of the most used criterion measures in orga-
nizational research(Murphy and Cleveland, 1991).
Practically, job performance as judged by super-
visors, informs important decisions such as: Who
is the right person for the job? Who should be
promoted? Who deserves a raise? Who needs fur-
ther training and development? The importance
of getting the ‘right’ answers to these questions
means that we need to understand what types of
This research was supported under Australian Research
Council’s Discovery (DP0346405) and Linkage (project
number LP0776767) funding schemes.The authors thank
participants for their engagement in the study.
behaviours are valued by supervisors when mak-
ing judgments about performance.
Although there is an extensive literature on
the factors that aect supervisors’ performance
judgements, much of the focus to date is on how
and when supervisors are influenced by employ-
ees’ performance on ‘core’ task (i.e. behaviours
that meet formalized job requirements) (Landy
and Farr, 1980). Given that it is widely accepted
that organizational eectiveness requires employ-
ees to do more than carry out core and pre-
scribed tasks, there is also a need to under-
stand the extent to which supervisors actually
give credit to behaviours beyond the fulfilment of
core task requirements (Borman and Motowidlo,
1993; Crant, 2000; Frese and Fay, 2001). Specifi-
cally, many scholars have argued that, in order for
© 2016 British Academy of Management. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4
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316 H. Nguyen et al.
organizations to be agile when the environment
is characterized by uncertainty, organizations also
need employees to be adaptable and responsive
(adaptive rolebehaviours), and to be proactive and
take initiative in situations that might not have
been anticipated (proactive role behaviours). But
are such behaviours, often referred to as emergent
role behavioursin contrast to fixed task behaviours
(Ilgen and Hollenbeck, 1991), actually valued by
supervisors in organizations? And if so, under
what conditions? These are the core questions we
address in the current paper. The issue is im-
portant because, by having a clearer understand-
ing of what actually influences supervisors’ per-
formance judgements, including both social and
behavioural factors, we can minimize the impact
of non-performance-related signals that may bias
performance evaluations through training to raise
awareness of these factors.
We focus this study on junior doctors working
in the emergency department of a hospital. The
question as to whether emergent role behaviours
are valued by supervisors is an especially pertinent
one in this context. Unlike other types of emergent
extra-role behaviours such as organizational citi-
zenship behaviour (OCB; Smith, Organ and Near,
1983), adaptive and proactive role behaviours are
pertinent and specific responses to complex and
dynamic workenvironments such as hospitals and,
in particular, hospital emergency departments.
Ilgen and Hollenbeck (1991) discussed how adap-
tive and proactive role behaviours are especially
necessary in high-scope jobs such as those held
by professionals because the ‘established task el-
ements’ barely cover what is needed for eective-
ness. Similarly, in their model of work perfor-
mance, Grin, Neal and Parker(2007) argued that
it is in highly uncertain and unpredictable situa-
tions that adaptive and proactive role behaviours
are especially required.
Uncertainty means that inputs,processes and/or
outputs lack predictability (Wall, Cordery and
Clegg, 2002), such as complex evolving customer
or patient demands.Adaptive role behaviour is im-
portant, because individuals need to be able to
cope with and respond to unpredictable events,
such as the doctor who is able to adaptively read-
just work priorities and shift focus in order to deal
with the changing needs and status of patients.
Proactive role behaviour is important, because un-
certainty means that it is not possible to specify
task requirements in advance. Individuals need to
be able to anticipate the situation and act in a self-
directed way to be eective, such as an emergency
doctor who proactively scans the patient flow and
acts on anticipated problems before they become
insurmountable.
Yet, despite the theorized importance of adap-
tive and proactive role behaviours in uncertain
environments, we do not know the extent to which
supervisors in these settings actually value such
behaviours (Borman and Motowidlo,1993; Crant,
2000; Frese and Fay, 2001; Murphy and Jackson,
1999; Parker, Williams and Turner, 2006; Pulakos
et al., 2000). For example, it has been argued that,
depending on a variety of factors, supervisors can
see employee proactive role behaviours as unnec-
essarily ‘shaking the boat’, a threat (Frese and
Fay, 2001) or as an ingratiation attempt (Bolino,
1999). In the one study that has addressed this
issue, Grant, Parker and Collins (2009) showed
that supervisors appreciate and givemore credit to
proactive role behaviours when they are enacted
by employees with low trait negative aect and
high prosocial values. This study demonstrates
that proactive role behaviours are not always
judged positively. Moreover, Grant, Parker and
Collins (2009) did not consider how supervisors
might judge adaptive role behaviour. For example,
it is possible that adaptive role behaviours are less
visible to supervisors, and therefore do not count
in supervisory judgements of performance. A cru-
cial contribution of this study is that we examine
the extent – in a context in which theory suggests
these behaviours are essential – to which adaptive
and proactive role behaviours of professionals are
valued by their supervisors.
Importantly, our focus is not on whether man-
agers say that they valuethese behaviours (or their
espoused values/beliefs), but whether they actu-
ally value these behaviours, as shown by giving
them credit when they judge employees’ overall
job performance. In other words, our focus is on
the extent to which various role behaviours predict
supervisor ratings of employees’ overall job per-
formance. Because of the rather implicit and un-
conscious nature of performance evaluation pro-
cesses, we expect that supervisors’ ratings will be
aected by not only the extent to whichindividuals
engage in adaptive and proactive role behaviours,
but also how these behaviours are enacted. Be-
cause both behaviours are emergent rather than
prescribed, and are often challenging to execute,
we propose that supervisors’ appreciation of these
© 2016 British Academy of Management.
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