Employees taking personal initiatives can end up looking like troublemakers

A team of psychologists has advised that any employee who wants to be a "doer" has to demonstrate proactive behavior as those who rely on personal initiative alone will be standing as an isolated troublemaker.

The study conducted at University of Bonn demonstrated that personal initiative is an absolute requirement for a professional career for self-employed professionals and entrepreneurs, employees are not always met with approval from the boss if they take the reins on their own.

Dr. Andreas Wihler and Prof. Gerhard Blickle from the Institute of Psychology at the University of Bonn, said that this also becomes clear in job advertisements, because 87 percent of employers demand these proactive skills from their applicants, but personal initiative by itself was of no benefit it has to be combined with social acumen in order to bring about success.

Researchers focused on these questions in a total of three studies. The first study involved 146 employees with their supervisors from a wide variety of fields and standardized tests were used to survey the extent to which the employees themselves took the initiative for action.

The second study, a questionnaire was used to ask 143 employed participants about their skill in utilizing favorable opportunities for changes through carefully selected behaviors.

The third study approached 219 employees and as before the researchers again asked about the company's receptiveness to proactive behavior and evaluated the personal initiative demonstrated in the test.

Blickle asserted that appropriate identification of favorable opportunities and the ability to adapt to the respective situation were important preconditions for skillfully putting personal initiative behaviors into place.

The study is published in the "Journal of Management".