Exploring Relationships between Proactive Personality and Job Performance of Athletic Coaches

This study investigated the direct impact of a coach’s proactive personality tendency on job performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and aimed to determine whether OCB mediates between proactive personality and job performance. To avoid common-method variance, we conducted a multi-source and inter-temporal empirical study. We distributed a two-phased questionnaire to coaches and sports team leaders of high school athletic classes in Taiwan. Results showed a significant correlation between proactive personality, job performance, and OCB and that OCB mediated between proactive personality and job performance. Our results suggest that proactive personality can crucially influence an athletic coach’s behavior and effectiveness. Moreover, in its exploration of the benefits of an athletic coach’s proactive personality traits from the perspective of organizational attachment theory and its in-depth analysis of the organizational behavior and work outcomes of sports coaches in athletic classes, this study expands the scope of applied organizational behavior research. Based on our findings, we offer recommendations for further work in sports management research.