Abstract Employee proactive behavior is vital to an enterprise’s survival and development, which has been an emerging research field of employee behavior in the workplace. However, there are few studies to explore employee proactive behavior both in the contexts of Chinese enterprises and western enterprise, especially in the context of Chinese enterprises. Drawing on the self-determination theory and behavioral plasticity theory, this study presents a motivational model to examine the influence of abusive supervision on employee proactive behavior. The empirical results indicated that abusive supervision is significantly and negatively related to employee proactive behavior, and this relationship is fully mediated by employee work engagement. Specifically, abusive supervision decreases subordinates’ levels of work engagement, and consequently leads to less proactive behaviors. This study also found that core self-evaluations attenuate the main effect of abusive supervision and the indirect effect of work engagement on employee proactive behavior.
2015, Vol. 12 
