What makes people more likely to initiate positive change within their organizations? I have sought to address this question during my doctoral research and adopted a relational perspective based on attachment theory to understand employee proactivity. In this book, I take the same perspective and extend my previous work by proposing a theoretical model to explain why having a sense of attachment security in social relationships can strengthen an individual's proactivity.

This book aims to bring an academic contribution from a new angle to understand why employees engage in proactive behaviour. At the same time, this project involves topicality by addressing the question of how to promote employees’ proactive behaviour, which has been widely asked in management. In this book I specifically focus on how attachment theory can be used to understand motivation and antecedents of proactive behaviour but do not intend to cover all topics, such as consequences of proactive behaviour. I have made this decision because I believe a narrow focus provides a greater degree of elaboration. Another reason for focusing on motivation and antecedents of proactive behaviour is to use attachment theory to develop a theoretical framework that integrates current understandings of motivational factors in shaping proactive behaviour. Although proactivity has been widely studied, a lack of an integrative theoretical framework has resulted in a patchwork of proactivity research. In this book I seek to elaborate why attachment theory can offer a theoretical framework that integrates the existing knowledge of proactivity and indicates directions for future research.

This book is partly based on my doctoral dissertation. Here I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my doctoral supervisor, Dr Sharon Parker, who led me to study proactivity and continues to give me encouragement, guidance and support to build an academic career. I am deeply indebted to Dr Yi-Cheng Lin and Dr Kaiping Yao for their supervision during my undergraduate and postgraduate training in psychology at National Taiwan University. Dr Lin evoked my research interests in attachment theory and guided me towards studying adult attachment in several projects. Dr Yao strengthened my research interests by encouraging me to use attachment theory for a course assignment as a lens to understand religion and quality of life. It is their guidance and encouragement that have supported my research journey on attachment from the very beginning.