Martine Coun

The study investigates to what extent empowering HRM practices (i.e., workplace flexibility, professional autonomy, and access to knowledge via ICT) and empowering leadership have the potential to motivate employees in displaying workplace proactivity in NWW context. The study builds on the empowerment theory to gain a better understanding of how supervisors or managers, and employees able to make choices to achieve the goals set in their work and how leadership can support this. A field study was conducted in four subsidiaries of a large Dutch bank active in the financial sector in the Netherlands which has made the transformation to self-managing teams with greater autonomy. In line with expectations, positive relationships were found between professional autonomy, access to knowledge via ICT and empowering leadership, on the one hand, and psychological empowerment, on the other. Also, in line with expectations, a positive relationship was found between psychological empowerment and workplace proactivity. Moreover, as hypothesized, psychological empowerment partly mediated the relationship between the HRM practices and empowering leadership and workplace proactivity. However, autonomy had a direct, negative effect on workplace proactivity. Also workplace flexibility was neither directly nor indirectly associated with workplace proactivity. Finally, HRM and leadership can be viewed as complementary as they combine different perspectives for employees in order to display proactive workplace behaviour. In conclusion, the empowerment process approach helped to disentangle the motivating elements that foster workplace proactivity in modern workplaces.

5.1 Introduction

Organizations are increasingly implementing new ways of working in their response to the agile and dynamic work environment pushed by new technologies, artificial intelligence, and digitalization. In order to enhance organizational agility in highly unpredictable and complex markets, employees’ workplace proactivity has become more and more a necessity (Binyamin & Brender-Ilan, 2018). Workplace proactivity refers to employees’ ability to take self-directed action to anticipate changes in their work and to respond to future possibilities instead of undergoing developments passively (Crant, 2000). However, workplace proactivity is not something that happens automatically; employees must be abled, motivated, and given the opportunity to enact specific workplace proactivity in the workplace (Appelbaum, Bailey, Berg, Kalleberg, & Bailey, 2000; Parker & Wu, 2014).

Over the past decades, many organizations have established empowering Human Resource Management (HRM) practices that are based on trust and that are assumed to motivate employees by offering and sharing autonomy, workplace flexibility, and providing access to information via ICT (Peters, Poutsma, Van der Heijden, Bakker, & Bruijn, 2014). These empowering HRM practices can comprise flexible work arrangements known as New Ways of Working (NWW) (cf. Gerdenitsch, Kubicek, & Korunka, 2015; Van der Heijden, Peters, & Kelliher, 2014). NWW offers workers electronic tools and information and communication technologies (ICT) which enable them to share their knowledge with peers inside and outside their organizations (Coun, Peters, & Blomme, 2019; Ten Brummelhuis, Bakker, Hetland, & Keulemans, 2012). Empowering HRM practices can enhance employees’ autonomous work motivation, which in turn can foster workplace proactivity and thus the generation of creative and innovative ideas. However, studies that linked the HRM system or HRM practices to workplace proactivity (e.g., Arefin, Arif, & Raquib, 2015; Batistič, Černe, Kaše, & Zupic, 2016; Chen, Lyu, Li, Zhou, & Li, 2017) mainly focused on practices such as selection, training, and reward systems which can be used to monitor and indirectly control people (Peters, Ligthart, Bardoel, & Poutsma, 2016) rather than on HRM practices which can be expected to motivate employees. Therefore, more empirical evidence is needed to determine how single empowering HRM practices (i.e., workplace flexibility, professional autonomy, and access to knowledge via ICT) can encourage workplace proactivity in an NWW context, and to determine what the underlying mechanisms are.

In addition to empowering HRM practices, empowering leadership may also play a role in encouraging workplace proactivity (Parker, Bindl, & Strauss, 2010; Parker & Wu, 2014). NWW and remote working often require leadership to shift from direct supervision and top-down control to more indirect forms of leadership (Peters et al., 2014). That is, in the context of NWW, leaders can no longer simply instruct their employees to be more proactive, but they have to empower them to display workplace proactivity and emphasize employees’ self-influence and self-directness (Sharma & Kirkman, 2015). Empowering leaders can facilitate and support employees by sharing broader responsibilities and decision-making authority, allowing them to plan their work and make their own decisions (Hill & Bartol, 2016). Although there is an increasing research interest in empowering leadership (cf. Kim, Beehr, & Prewett, 2018; Lee, Willis, & Tian, 2018; Sharma & Kirkman, 2015), only few studies have investigated the relationship between empowering leadership and workplace proactivity (Martin, Liao, & Campbell, 2013; Schilpzand, Houston, & Cho, 2018). Hence, more empirical evidence is needed to reveal how empowering leadership can foster workplace proactivity.

In order to explain how both HRM practices and empowering leadership contribute to workplace proactivity, the empowerment literature can be helpful. Within this body of