Abstract
Building on the prior work of employee work behavior and attitudes at workplace, we examined how the congruence of person-coworker in taking initiative influences employees’ affective commitment and organizational citizenship behavior in the present study. We used polynomial regressions to test whether the more aligned a person and his/her coworkers’ levels of taking initiative are, the better quality of work engagement and team member exchange. Further, we proposed that work engagement was higher but team member exchange was lower when personal initiative was higher than perceived coworkers’ rather than when personal initiative was lower than perceived coworkers’. Mediation effects of work engagement and team member exchange quality on the relationship between congruent initiative and outcome variables (i.e., affective commitment and organizational citizenship behavior) were also examined. The findings highlight the importance of taking multiple perspectives from both employees and their coworkers while considering the implications of teamwork.