When Leaders Act as Role Models of Proactive Behavior – Executive Summary
Journal of Business and Psychology, by Frank Belschak & Deanne Den Hartog, published August 2025
1. Summary
“When Leaders Act as Role Models of Proactive Behavior” (Journal of Business and Psychology, 2025) argues that proactive behavior spreads from leader to follower, but only under conditions that sit with the employee rather than the leader. Building on social learning theory and Parker's model of proactive motivation, they test whether positive affect ("energized to"), self-efficacy ("can do"), and outcome expectancies ("reason to") govern when a leader's initiative gets picked up. Two multi-source field studies among Dutch employees, one with 98 employee-colleague dyads and one with 180 employee-supervisor pairs, confirm the role modeling effect with sharp boundaries. Positive affect is the amplifier: employees in a positive emotional state emulate their leader's initiative, those low on it show no link at all. Self-efficacy runs opposite to the authors' prediction, with role modeling appearing only among employees low on role breadth self-efficacy. Outcome expectancies show no effect on their own.
2. Relevance for CIOs
Initiative in an IT organization cannot be mandated through target agreements or role descriptions, because it spreads by observation and only lands on receptive ground. If a CIO wants demand management, architecture governance, or portfolio decisions driven from below rather than escalated upward, the visible behavior of the leadership team is the primary instrument. Team climate becomes an operational variable: in a department worn down by a stalled transformation, the same example produces close to nothing, so restoring energy is a precondition rather than a follow-up. And since expectancies only mattered alongside a positive climate, incentive schemes are a poor first fix for a passive culture.
3. Thoughts from Sonny Claussen (CEO Bee360) about this Article
At the 2026 Bee360 all-hands, Sonny Claussen rewrote one of the company's core values, replacing language about responsibility being shared and transferred with three sharper lines: we don't wait for others to fix things, we ask where we create value, and when things change we shape it. His point was that responsibility has to be seized, not assigned. This study gave him language for what he had sensed: initiative is caught from watching someone take it, and it only transfers to people with energy.