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The impact of proactive personality and needs-supplies fit on the career success of pediatric healthcare workers

BMC Health Services Research volume 25, Article number: 345 (2025) Cite this article

Abstract

Background

Career success is crucial for both individuals and organizations. Even though career success is considered an individual result, it depends on the organization’s success and can contribute to its success. This study uses proactive personality and needs-supplies fit as independent variables to explore the potential relationship between proactive personality and needs-supplies fit and the career success of pediatric healthcare workers.

Method

The dataset used in the study was formed through convenience sampling at Children’s Hospital of Hebei Province in September and October 2023, using the Wenjuanxing online platform, including sociodemographic characteristics, proactive personality score, needs-supplies fit score, and career success score. The hierarchical linear regression analysis model is used to explore the relationship between proactive personality and needs-supplies fit and the career success of pediatric healthcare workers.

Result

Five hundred forty-six questionnaires were collected, of which 371 were valid, with an effective rate of 67.95%. The results of the hierarchical linear regression analysis indicate that proactive personality (Step 2: β = 0.597, p < 0.001; Step 3: β = 0.221, p < 0.001) and needs-supplies fit (Step 3: β = 0.550, p < 0.001) are positively related to the career success of pediatric healthcare workers, after controlling for the potential role of sociodemographic variables.

Conclusion

We found that proactive personality and needs-supplies fit are positively related to the career success of pediatric healthcare workers, and suggest emphasizing the important role of employee career success and actively taking targeted and effective measures.

Peer Review reports

Introduction

Career success is defined as the positive psychological or work-related outcomes or achievements accumulated by a person due to work experience, according to Judge et al.‘s definition [1]. It is considered a cumulative result, which is the sum of behaviors over a relatively long period [2]. Career success is often evaluated objectively and subjectively. Objective career success, also known as external career success in some studies, is defined as a result that can be directly observed and measured using a standardized manner [3, 4], with salary and promotion commonly used as measurement criteria [1]. Subjective career success is considered as an individual’s sense of career achievement and satisfaction [1], as well as their subjective judgment and evaluation of their profession [4], among which career satisfaction is considered an important evaluation criterion [5, 6]. In organizational behavior, research on objective career success started very early. However, in the era of boundaryless careers, the importance of considering subjective career success is increasingly prominent. Because traditional career success measurement standards based on objective aspects such as promotion and salary are becoming increasingly inconsistent with current organizational structures and employee attitudes, highlighting the important effect of subjective evaluation on career success [7]. Moreover, researchers have found that individuals have different perspectives and standards towards career success [8, 9], and their views on career success are largely influenced by self-concept [9], with varying degrees of emphasis on factors such as status and income [4]. Therefore, only individuals can define and evaluate their career success when pursuing heterogeneity and unique career paths [10]. Subjective career success, which refers to an employee’s perception of their career [11], is considered a more multidimensional and complex concept than objective career success [7]. Therefore, in the modern career environment that emphasizes mobility and unpredictability [12], it has received increasing attention from researchers.

Career success plays an important role for both individuals and organizations. Although career success is the result of an individual, it depends on the organization’s success and contributes to its success [3]. Given the significant effect of career success on individuals and organizations, researchers have explored important factors that can influence career success [11, 13, 14]. Researchers have pointed out a significant correlation between individual traits such as emotional intelligence [15], resilience [16], proactive career orientation [17], and career adaptability [18] and career success. Some researchers have also pointed out the importance of the environment, believing that employee success cannot be achieved without the support of the environment, such as mentoring [17] and organizational support [19]. In this study, we emphasize the potential relationship between proactive personality and needs-supplies fit with career success.

Firstly, this study hypothesizes that the proactive personality can be positively correlated with career success. The proactive personality is defined as a person who is relatively independent of situational forces and influences environmental changes [20], which is a stable tendency to take personal initiative in various activities and situations [21]. Proactive personality is also considered an important prerequisite for career success [2, 22], because proactive individuals often create more favorable conditions for personal success in the workplace, thereby achieving greater objective and subjective career outcomes [2, 23]. Previous studies have also confirmed a significant positive relationship between proactive personality and career success [2, 22, 24]. Secondly, this study hypothesizes that proactive personality and needs-supplies fit can be positively correlated with career success, based on the integration of the Conservation of Resources (COR) Theory and person-environment fit theory [25,26,27,28]. According to the COR theory, resources are crucial in achieving career success, as career success is seen as “achieving goals according to one’s own will” [4, 29], while the COR points out that resources have significant value in helping individuals achieve their personal goals [25]. The COR theory broadly defines resources as things that can help individuals achieve their goals [25]. In the process of developing COR, researchers have found that resources can come from individuals or the environment. This provides us with important insights, that is, in the process of achieving career success, in addition to individual personality traits as an important source of resources, resources can also be obtained from the environment they are in [26]. But returning to the definition of resources in COR theory, we can find that resources are based on individual perception [25]. That is to say, whether something obtained from the environment is a resource for an individual still needs to be evaluated based on whether the thing meets the individual’s needs. The process of individuals making consistent judgments between their own needs and what they have obtained from the environment is the process of assessing needs-supplies fit. When the environment provides things that meet individual needs, needs-supplies fit is achieved [27], thereby promoting employees’ perception of career success [30]. Based on this, we believe that a proactive personality and needs-supplies fit can be positively correlated with career success.

Career success is of great significance to both employees and organizations. The literature review found that career success can significantly improve employees’ career self-efficacy [31], and those with higher career success have less career mobility [32]. In the context of healthcare, it is also important to focus on the career success of healthcare workers. Career success is significantly negatively related to healthcare workers’ turnover intention [33, 34], which means that we can consider career success as an important control factor in reducing healthcare workers’ turnover intention. In this study, we focused on the special group of pediatric healthcare workers, as they face greater challenges compared to other healthcare workers, as they have a higher turnover intention compared to other professions [35]. A nationwide study has suggested that 12.6% of pediatricians in China choose to resign, with the majority being young doctors [36], which is not good news. However, researchers have pointed out that career-related satisfaction is significantly negatively correlated with the turnover intention of pediatric healthcare workers [37]. Therefore, this study focuses on the subjective career success of pediatric healthcare workers and attempts to explore the relationship between proactive personality, need-supplies fit, and career success, providing further ideas for intervening in the turnover intention of pediatric healthcare workers and ensuring the stability of pediatric health human resources.

Data sources and methods

Data sources

The study used a dataset formed through convenience sampling using the Wenjuanxing online platform at Children’s Hospital of Hebei Province in September and October 2023, which includes basic information, personality, person-environment fit perception, career development assessment, and turnover intention of the respondents. This study incorporated sociodemographic, proactive personality, needs-supplies fit, and career success-related data into practical analysis. The project was approved by the Medical Ethics Committee of Hebei Children’s Hospital, and the respondents expressed informed consent and authorized the use of the data.

The link to access the questionnaire was provided in the WeChat group for interested group members to participate in the survey and freely share it with other potential participants. We collected a total of 546 survey questionnaires and conducted data quality control by examining IP addresses and three scales containing both forward and reverse items. Specifically, to avoid the impact of the same participant participating in this survey through different sharers on the results, questionnaires from the same IP address were excluded. In addition, the questionnaire includes three scales consisting of both forward and reverse items for further quality control. Respondents with consistent options in a scale that includes both forward and reverse items were marked separately. If respondents were marked on all three scales that include both forward and reverse items, they will also be excluded. After strict quality control, we excluded 175 questionnaires, and ultimately, there were 371 valid questionnaires in this study, with an effective rate of 67.95%.

Research tools

Career success

We used the scale proposed by Greenhaus et al. to measure the subjective perception of pediatric healthcare workers towards career success [38], which can comprehensively evaluate their satisfaction with their current career based on aspects such as career success, goal achievement, income, promotion, and skill development. This scale has a total of 5 items, including “I am satisfied with the success I have learned in my career.“(Please refer to the manuscript published by Greenhaus et al. in the Academy of Management Journal in 1990 [38]). In this study, the Likert-5 rating method was used (The higher score meaning higher career success), and compared to the original scale’s Cronbach’s alpha of 0.88, the Cronbach’s alpha in this study is 0.952.

Proactive personality

We used the proactive personality scale proposed by Seibert et al. to evaluate the proactivity of pediatric healthcare workers [2], which consists of 10 items, including the example “I am consistently on the lookout for new ways to improve my life.“(Please refer to the manuscript published by Seibert et al. in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 1999 [2]). The Cronbach’s alpha of the original scale is 0.86, and the Likert-7 scoring method was used. In this study, we used the Likert-5 rating method, where higher scores indicate higher self-reported proactivity and Cronbach’s alpha is 0.926.

Needs-supplies fit

The needs-supplies fit scale, excerpted from Cable and DeRue’s manuscripts, was utilized to evaluate the perceived needs-supplies fit of pediatric healthcare workers [27]. This scale can assess the degree of consistency between one’s own needs and what the environment provides (Detailed items can refer to the manuscripts published by Cable and DeRue in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2002 [27]). The Cronbach’s alpha reported on the original scale ranges from 0.89 to 0.93. In this study, we also used the Likert-5 rating method, where a higher score is regarded as a higher degree of consistency, and Cronbach’s alpha is 0.946.

Statistical analysis

In this study, the frequency and percentage were used to describe categorical variables such as sociodemographic variables, while M ± SD was used to describe continuous data such as scores on various scales. Among them, univariate analysis was conducted using an independent sample t-test and one-way ANOVA, and the partial correlation analysis was used to evaluate the correlation between the scores of each scale. Finally, we explored the influencing factors of career success after controlling for the potential role of sociodemographic variables through the Hierarchical linear regression analysis. All statistical analyses involved in this study were implemented in SPSS 26.0.

Results

Descriptive analysis and univariate analysis

Among the 371 respondents, females accounted for the majority (84.64%), married people dominated (77.90%), the educational background was mainly undergraduate or below (64.96%), and the highest number of individuals with a monthly income of 10,000 RMB or below (80.86%), with junior or intermediate professional titles being the main group (88.41%). Among them, individuals aged 30 and below account for 29.38%, those aged 31 to 35 account for 31.54%, and those aged 41 and above account for the least (15.36%). The main group is nurses (44.20%), with doctors, medical technicians, and pharmacists accounting for 29.11%, 15.09%, and 11.59%, respectively. See Table 1.

Table 1 Sample characteristics and univariate analysis
Full size table

Correlation analysis

Given that income and promotion are often reported as important influencing factors for career success in previous studies. When exploring the correlation between proactive personality, needs-supplies fit, and career success, this study conducted a partial correlation analysis using monthly income and professional title level as control variables. As can be seen in Table 2, there is a positive correlation between proactive personality, needs-supplies fit, and career success, with correlation coefficients of 0.616 and 0.710, respectively.

Table 2 Partial correlation analysis
Full size table

Regression analysis

According to the data, we used the hierarchical linear regression analysis to explore the influencing factors of career success among pediatric healthcare workers. Using career success as the dependent variable, sociodemographic variables were included in the first step (F = 2.467**, Adjusted R2 = 0.042), proactive personality was further included in the second step (F = 20.791***, Adjusted R2 = 0.391). Then, based on the second step, the needs-supplies fit was further included in the third step (F = 34.734***, Adjusted R2 = 0.542). The test results of the regression model indicate the reliability of this model (where the Durbin Watson value is 1.919, and VIF is all below 10). The regression analysis results in Table 3 suggest the positive relationship between proactive personality (Step 2: β = 0.597, p < 0.001; Step 3: β = 0.221, p < 0.001) and needs-supplies fit (Step 3: β = 0.550, p < 0.001) and career success, after controlling for sociodemographic variables.

Table 3 Hierarchical linear regression analysis of career success
Full size table

Discussion

General discussion

In summary, this study explores the potential role of proactive personality and needs-supplies fit in the career success of pediatric healthcare workers by constructing a hierarchical linear regression model after controlling for sociodemographic variables. Specifically, in the first step of hierarchical linear regression analysis, we added various sociodemographic variables including gender and age to control for the potential effect of sociodemographic characteristics. Subsequently, proactive personality and needs-supplies fit variables were gradually incorporated into the second and third steps to explore their potential effects on perceived career success, respectively, after controlling for the potential role of sociodemographic characteristics. The results of hierarchical linear regression analysis indicate that proactive personality and needs-supplies fit are positively related to the career success of pediatric healthcare workers.

Firstly, we would like to emphasize the relationship between monthly income and professional title and the perceived career success of pediatric healthcare workers. The results of the hierarchical linear regression model suggest that in all three steps, the relationship between monthly income and career success among pediatric healthcare workers did not show statistical significance, while the variable of professional title showed a stable positive relationship with career success. As a pre-variable for predicting career success, some studies have pointed out the important role of salary [39,40,41], but in this study, monthly income did not show the same effect as in previous studies. This may be due to the limited significance of salary for career success in salary-institutionalized work [42]. In addition, some studies have pointed out the positive relationship between promotion and career success [1, 2, 40]. This study found a positive relationship between title promotion and career success among pediatric healthcare workers, although the focus here is not on traditional job promotions, but on improvements in professional and technical fields. This has brought us some thoughts about promotion, perhaps both title promotion and job promotion are of great significance for personal career success.

Secondly, this study confirms that proactive personality is positively related to the subjective career success of pediatric healthcare workers, whether controlling for the potential role of sociodemographic variables in step two or further adding needs-supplies fit variables in step three. Of course, this result is similar to previous research, which suggested that more proactive individuals are more likely to achieve career success [2, 22, 24, 43]. Previous studies have pointed out that personality is often believed to influence career success, as careers are products of accumulated behaviors over time, and personality plays a dominant role in behavioral choices [2]. The proactive personality is defined as a person who is relatively independent of situational forces and influences environmental changes [20]. Proactive individuals seek opportunities, demonstrate initiative, take action, and persevere until they bring about change [44], which is a stable trend of taking personal initiative in various activities and situations [21]. Research has suggested that the proactive personality is positively related to many work-related and career-related outcomes, such as self-efficacy, organizational commitment, and leader-member exchange [24, 45]. In addition, studies have also explored the mediating factors between proactive personality and career success. For example, proactive individuals exhibit more organizational citizenship behavior, which can affect subjective career success [22], and proactive individuals can also utilize competitive and sponsorship mobility to achieve career success [24].

Finally, we emphasize the important role of needs-supplies fit, and statistical analysis shows that there is a positive relationship between needs-supplies fit and the subjective career success of pediatric healthcare workers. After adding the needs-supplies fit variable in the third step, the Adjusted R2 increased from 0.391 in step 2 to 0.542. Consistent with our research findings, previous studies have also reported the important role of needs-supplies fit and its positive relationship with perceived career success [27, 30]. As described earlier, career success is seen as achieving one’s career goals [4, 29], in which resources from the environment can play a crucial role [25]. For individuals, whether the things provided by the environment are resources needs to be evaluated by whether the things provided can meet their needs because resources are perceived and defined by individuals [25]. Needs-supplies fit means that one’s own needs can be met by the environment [27, 28], and things from the environment that can meet individual needs are important resources for individuals, thus enabling them to contribute to their career success [25]. This can also be explained by the theory of work adjustment, which states that as a living organism, employees have needs that must be met, many or even most of which are fulfilled through their environment. Moreover, most of an individual’s behavior when interacting with the environment is to meet these requirements, and the fulfillment of these needs will bring satisfaction [46]. At the same time, the environment of concern is actually the work environment, which in our contemporary world is actually the work organization [46]. This means that employees will make consistent judgments between their own needs and what they receive from their services and work efforts [27]. When individual needs can be provided by the supply (reward) of work, the needs-supplies fit will be achieved [28], thereby increasing employee satisfaction with their work and career [27] and promoting their perceived career success [30].

Inspiration and practical application

For employees, career success is of great significance. Previous researchers have confirmed that career success is associated with many positive outcomes, such as occupational self-efficacy [31] and well-being [32]. Therefore, career success is worth being a goal that employees eagerly pursue.

We would like to emphasize a key issue involved here, which is how to define and evaluate one’s career success. Researchers have long noticed that individuals have different perspectives and standards for career success [8, 9]. For example, Pellegrin and Coates found that senior management and frontline supervisors have different definitions of career success, with senior management emphasizing the importance of promotion and supervisors focusing on personal and family safety [47]. This is because people have different career ideals and attach varying degrees of importance to factors such as status and income [4], and their views on career success are largely influenced by self-concept [9]. However, it is necessary to have a clear definition and measurement of career success for oneself, as this defines standards and expectations, serving as a reference point for evaluating career success [48]. Moreover, it has been proven that clear standards for career success can actively promote career satisfaction [49].

In addition to clarifying one’s own career success, taking positive measures and efforts is the second point we want to emphasize. Many studies have confirmed the positive relationship between proactive personality and career success [2, 22]. But subsequent researchers have further pointed out that the reason why the proactive personality can have a positive relationship with career success is mainly because proactive individuals often create more favorable conditions for personal success in the workplace [23], eliminate obstacles that hinder their satisfaction [50], and thus contribute to their career success. This inspires us that although a person may not be able to quickly or easily change their personality, they may be able to change behaviors related to personality that affect career success [43]. For example, research has shown that proactive personality is a predictor variable of work engagement, and work engagement mediates the relationship between proactive personality and job satisfaction [51], suggesting that employees may be able to focus more on work engagement to achieve career success.

In addition, seeking an organization that can meet one’s own needs is also crucial and necessary. The match between what the organization provides and its own needs is closely related to the subjective career success of employees [30]. This is because individual satisfaction can be predicted by the correspondence between what the organization provides and individual needs [46], and an important criterion for employee career success is whether their work can meet their own needs, which may be economic, social, or psychological [27]. When employees are in an organization with a higher level of needs-supplies fit, they are more willing to demonstrate sustained effort and grit [52], which is significantly related to career success [53]. They will feel a higher level of support because perceived organizational support can reflect the quality of the exchange relationship between individuals and employers [54], and this perceived organizational support is positively related to career success [55].

At the same time, we also hope to draw the attention of employers or organizations, as the career success of employees is equally important to organizations. Although career success is an individual result, it depends on the success of the organization and can in turn contribute to its success [3]. Moreover, subjective career success is related to a stronger internal focus among employees. Employees who are more satisfied with their careers will feel that they are more suitable for the current organization [56], while those who give themselves higher evaluations of subjective career success will exhibit less career mobility [32].

We believe that organizations should make targeted potential evaluations in the process of selecting personnel. This study suggests that the proactive personality is significantly positively related to the career success of pediatric healthcare workers. Therefore, we want to emphasize the potential effect of the proactive personality. Studies have found that individuals with higher proactive personalities perform better in their work or career, such as better work engagement [57] and stronger career adaptability [58]. Moreover, researchers believe that the proactive personality is a relatively stable trait that reflects an individual’s tendency to control situational forces and actively incite environmental changes [44]. Researchers have also developed corresponding tools to evaluate individual proactivity, such as the scale developed by Bateman and Crant in 1993 [44], and the scale developed by Seibert et al. in 1999 [2]. Organizations or employers can consider using these established tools to assess the proactivity of potential employees. However, it should be noted that this study is a targeted study of pediatric healthcare workers in the Chinese medical environment. Perhaps for other professions, the importance of a proactive personality may not be as significant as certain specific traits. Therefore, what we want to emphasize more is that it is more important to search for corresponding personnel based on the potential characteristics of the organization or current position.

It is necessary to provide potential resource investment for the career success of employees. Employee satisfaction is a function of what they want to gain from their work and what they believe the work can provide [59]. The greater the difference between individual needs and what the work provides (such as resources), the less satisfied the individual is [26]. Moreover, career success is also seen as " the attainment of an object according to one’s desire” [4, 29]. In the process of employees achieving personal goals, resources can play a crucial role [25], with resources from the environment being an important component [26]. Although individuals can seek resources through social support from both work and non-work sources, researchers have pointed out that, compared to social support from non-work sources, social support from work sources is more valuable in ensuring individuals achieve career-related goals [60, 61]. Therefore, employees who receive training and skill development opportunities or career sponsorship are more likely to achieve career success [62]. Moreover, when individuals obtain various supportive resources from their organization, they are more inclined to invest resources to prevent potential resource losses, and this cycle of resource acquisition and investment can enable individuals to obtain greater success in their careers [63].

We would like to remind future researchers about the limitations. Firstly, this study is a cross-sectional, single-center study, and future researchers should pay attention to the potential impact of sample characteristics and the potential limitations of using cross-sectional data to explore causal relationships when promoting the conclusions of this study. Secondly, this study used a convenience sampling method instead of random sampling to form the dataset. The respondents have the autonomy to choose whether to participate in this survey, and it was impossible to know how many people were actually covered by the survey, which limited the representativeness of the population, and the calculation of response rate, and may lead to response bias in this study. Finally, self-reporting is also an important limitation, as these respondents may report information they deem appropriate rather than accurate, which may overestimate or underestimate certain variables. Future researchers can further consider using objective evaluation tools to collect data from other sources. However, we still believe that this research has significant theoretical significance and practical value. Examining the potential relationship between proactive personality and needs-supplies fit and the career success of pediatric healthcare workers in China, not only enriches the literature in the field of career success but also provides practical assistance for the career development of pediatric healthcare workers.

Conclusion

The potential relationship between proactive personality, needs-supplies fit, and subjective career success of pediatric healthcare workers was explored by constructing a hierarchical linear regression analysis model. The research results indicated that controlling for the potential role of other sociodemographic characteristics, both proactive personality and perceived needs-supplies fit is positively related to the career success of pediatric healthcare workers. We suggest that employees and employers/organizations should notice the important role of their own/employee career development, as well as the significant role of proactive personality and needs-supplies fit in career success, and take targeted and effective measures.

Data availability

Further data can be requested from the corresponding author through reasonable requests.

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Acknowledgements

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Funding

This project has received support from the Hebei Provincial Department of Human Resources and Social Security.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Organization and Personnel Department, Children’s Hospital of Hebei Province, Shijiazhuang, China

    Qingwen Jia & Hao Yuan

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  1. Qingwen Jia
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  2. Hao Yuan
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Contributions

Q.J drafted the manuscript, conducted statistical analysis, and made revisions to the manuscript. H.Y conceptualized the study design, participated in the manuscript revision and conducted a critical review.

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Correspondence to Hao Yuan.

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Jia, Q., Yuan, H. The impact of proactive personality and needs-supplies fit on the career success of pediatric healthcare workers. BMC Health Serv Res 25, 345 (2025). https://doiorg.publicaciones.saludcastillayleon.es/10.1186/s12913-025-12485-3

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BMC Health Services Research

ISSN: 1472-6963

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