Personal initiative,commitment and affect at work

This paper reports two studies on the relationships between employees' personal initiative, affect and commitment. The results of Study 1 among 390 health care sector employees show that individuals' self‐rated personal initiative is related to affect as well as affective commitment to four distinguishable foci, namely the organization, supervisor, work‐group and career. Commitment explains unique variance in personal initiative, even when controlling for demographic variables and positive and negative work affect. As Study 1 relied solely on self‐report data, multi‐source data were gathered for Study 2 (N = 80). This allowed retesting the hypotheses using both self‐ and manager‐ratings of initiative. Results showed that commitment explains variance in both self‐ and manager‐rated initiative beyond demographics and affect. For self‐rated initiative, team commitment explains most variance, whereas for manager‐rated initiative, organizational commitment does.