CONCLUDING COMMENTS
Individuals are more successful when they ‘make things happen’ in their careers. This can be in the form of proactive work behavior, proactive strategic behavior, or proactive person-environment fit behavior. All these types of proactivity can have positive outcomes for an individual’s careers. In contrast, a passive approach to one’s career can mean getting stuck in an unfulfilling or exhausting job, accepting an unsatisfactory status quo, and ultimately, not realizing your future work self. Yet proactivity is risky! Fear and uncertainty about how proactivity will turn out, or not seeing why proactivity is needed, often holds people back from actively taking charge of one’s work life, resulting in a lack of can do, reason to, or energized to motivation for proactivity. We described how you can use this motivational model to identify areas where you are most likely to apply your proactivity. You can also think about how you are going to be proactive. Setting unwise proactive goals, or pursuing proactive goals in an unwise way, is more likely to damage your reputation, result in burnout, and/or harm your career than wise approaches to proactivity. When taking charge of your career, set clear goals that reflect your priorities and take care of your time and energy, though do not lose sight of the interests of others alongside with the bigger picture for your workgroup and the organization. In sum, we have suggested the way forward lies not in passivity, nor in egocentric proactivity, but in wise proactivity.
