Proactive personality and mental well-being among the working population: testing a moderated mediation model

Purpose Mental health issues negatively affect employees’ quality of life and employers’ bottom line. Consequently, ensuring well-being in the workplace is becoming a high priority from a strategic human resource management perspective. Drawing on basic psychological needs theory, we propose that proactive personality will be related to mental well-being through satisfaction of basic psychological needs. In addition, drawing on the trait-by-trait interactions perspective, we expect the mediated relationship to be moderated by conscientiousness. Design/methodology/approach We tested our research model using data collected from 185 employees using a three-wave time-lagged design. Findings Proactive personality related to mental well-being indirectly, via psychological need satisfaction, and this indirect relationship was stronger at higher levels of conscientiousness. Practical implications Ensuring mental well-being of employees is critical to achieving a competitive advantage. Support for the mediating role of need satisfaction suggests that organizations can tailor interventions aimed at influencing the more malleable mediating variable, psychological need satisfaction, compared to relatively stable personality traits. Originality/value We contribute to theory by testing a theoretical explanation for how and why personality affects mental well-being. Another theoretical contribution is demonstrating that mental well-being results from a combination of personality traits, with a trait-by-trait perspective fitting the data better than an unconditional trait model.