How and When Employees' Growth Mindset Promotes Proactive Behavior: Alleviating Workplace Anxiety Under Time Pressure

In increasingly dynamic and uncertain organizational environments, employees' proactive behavior-characterized by self-initiation, future orientation, and change orientation-is critical for organizational adaptability and long-term competitiveness. Prior research has primarily examined how externally provided job resources stimulate proactive behavior. More recent work has begun to consider employees' personal resources, but it largely adopts a capability level-based view, conceptualizing them as self-evaluations of individuals' ability to control and influence their environment. This focus overlooks capability malleability-based personal resources that shape more fundamental beliefs about the malleability of human capability.

Drawing on the job demands-resources (JD-R) model, this study investigates how employees' growth mindset-reflecting beliefs that human capability can be developed-promotes proactive behavior by alleviating workplace anxiety, an anticipatory emotional state rooted in concerns about future work-related threats. We further examine time pressure as a key boundary condition.

A three-wave, multisource survey design was employed, collecting data from 326 employee-supervisor dyads.

The results show that employees' growth mindset is negatively associated with workplace anxiety, which in turn positively predicts proactive behavior. Moreover, time pressure strengthens both the anxiety-buffering effect of growth mindset and the indirect effect of growth mindset on proactive behavior via workplace anxiety.

By incorporating capability malleability-based personal resources into the JD-R model, this study advances understanding of the antecedents of proactive behavior beyond capability level-based self-evaluations toward deeper beliefs about the malleability of human capability.

This study offers practical implications for managers seeking to cultivate employee proactivity.