Proactive personality: A bibliographic review of research trends and publications

Abstract

Proactive personality, as a personal initiative construct, enriches the growing body of literature in the field of business, management, and psychology. However, limited literature exists to synthesize the concept, and even no effort has been made to quantify and present the knowledge structure of proactive personality in the field. This study is a systematic review of 730 peer-reviewed articles from 62 journals in the Web of Science Core collection database between 1990 and 2020 in the field of business and economics. Using bibliometric analysis, 35,200 citations were used to highlight key contributions, citation networks, and fundamental research themes. Citation analysis presents the prolific scholars and main keywords that contribute to proactive personality research. Bibliographic coupling helps to classify thematic structure into five clusters: (i) entrepreneurship and corporate social responsibility, (ii) career development and performance, (iii) job crafting and work engagement, (iv) leadership and innovation, and (v) socialization and information seeking. These clusters received disproportionate attention in the past and may expect to gain popularity in the future trajectory of the topic.