Fostering Career Adaptability for Organisational Citizenship Behaviour: Roles of Proactive Personality and Developmental Leadership

The study aims to evaluate the interactive influence of proactive personality and developmental leadership on career adaptability. Additionally, we examined the impact of proactive personality and developmental leadership on organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) through the mediating role of career adaptability. We surveyed 245 employees in the Indian IT sector over two rounds. Data analysis was performed using SPSS and Mplus 7.0. Results highlight that developmental leadership moderated the proactive personality–career adaptability link. Particularly, the positive relationship between proactive personality and career adaptability was stronger at a lower level of developmental leadership. Furthermore, career adaptability functioned as a partial mediator in the proactive personality–OCB link, and developmental leadership functioned as a moderator in this indirect association. Our study links proactive personality with career adaptability from the developmental leadership perspective that no prior research has explored. The study advances the career construction theory by observing the interaction of contextual factors (i.e., developmental leadership) with individual factors (i.e., proactive personality) in developing career adaptability. We use this model to achieve work-related outcomes of OCB and verify the self-regulation mechanism of career adaptability by identifying the mechanism to develop career adaptability.