From career calling to proactivity in healthcare professionals: the roles of responsibility, mission commitment, and responsible leadership.

Against the backdrop of recurrent public health risks and continuously rising demands for healthcare services, healthcare professionals increasingly perform under conditions characterized by heavy workloads and high uncertainty. In such contexts, proactive work behavior is pivotal for improving service quality, safeguarding patient safety, and enhancing organizational resilience. Career calling-defined as a deep-seated sense of occupational meaning, value, and prosocial purpose-may motivate healthcare professionals to engage in proactivity that goes beyond formal role requirements. Drawing on role identity theory and social information processing theory, we develop and test a moderated mediation model in which career calling promotes proactive work behavior through two psychological mechanisms-sense of responsibility and mission commitment-and in which responsible leadership amplifies these effects. Survey data from 417 healthcare professionals were analyzed to evaluate the proposed model. Results show that (a) career calling is positively associated with proactive work behavior; (b) sense of responsibility and mission commitment each mediate the relationship between career calling and proactive work behavior; (c) responsible leadership strengthens the positive effects of career calling on sense of responsibility and mission commitment; and (d) responsible leadership further intensifies the indirect effects of career calling on proactive work behavior via both mediators, providing evidence for moderated mediation.