Just reading a great study summarising the relationship between a pro-active personality and career success (meta-analyzing 313 correlations from 107 studies). It suggests that a proactive personality is associated with career success. Proactive personalities seem linked to job performance and behaviors like taking charge. The authors make the point that proactive personalities are more closely associated with supervisor ratings of overall job performance than that reported for any of the Big Five personality factors (Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism) or combinations of Big Five factors. Proactive personality was positively related to a variety of employability-related variables (e.g., learning goal orientation, career self-efficacy), four Big Five trait factors (extraversion, openness to experience, conscientiousness, and neuroticism), but is unrelated to social desirability.

A great study in the Journal of Vocational Behavior, but you don’t need me to tell you that, because with your proactive personality, you’ve already clicked the link, and bought/downloaded the original article!!