Proactive personality as a moderator between work stress and employees’ internal growth

We introduced and interpreted stress-related growth from the perspective of individual career development, to examine the relationship between work stress and self-efficacy, which is an indicator of internal career growth. We explored why some employees achieve self-development and growth in their career under stress but others do not. We used a 2-wave longitudinal design with engineers and accountants (202 valid samples) from the Chinese mainland. Results indicated that proactive personality had a significant moderating effect on the relationship between work stress and self-efficacy. Specifically, work stress increased the self-efficacy of highly proactive employees but decreased that of less proactive employees. This suggests that managers can moderately increase the work stress of employees with a highly proactive personality to promote their internal career growth.