Purpose: The topic of employees’ taking charge behaviors has garnered increasing interest in both practical and academic fields. Leaders play a critical role in influencing followers’ taking charge behaviors, yet few studies have explored the predicting role of benevolent leadership. Drawing from proactive motivation literature, this paper aims to investigate a moderated mediation model that examines work engagement as the mediator and role-breadth self-efficacy as the moderator in the relationship between benevolent leadership and taking charge.Design/methodology/approach: Matched data were collected from 297 followers and their group leaders in three subsidiaries of a large telecommunication company in China. The authors used hierarchical linear modeling to test the hypotheses.Findings: The results revealed that benevolent leadership was positively related to followers’ work engagement and consequently their taking charge behaviors. Moreover, such moderated mediation relationship was stronger among followers who had low rather than high levels of role-breadth self-efficacy.Research limitations/implications: The primary contribution of this study is building a contingent model for the effect of benevolent leadership on follower taking charge and thereby extending the nomological networks of both benevolent leadership and taking charge literatures. Another contribution is that this research provides a new perspective to understand how leadership leads to followers’ taking charge behaviors.Originality/value: This is the first study to investigate how and when benevolent leadership predicts follower taking charge.

Purpose: Matching with the timeline of major events in China, as well as major shifts in China’s human research management, the purpose of this paper is to present the comparisons of achieving styles among Chinese millennial employees, millennial university students and Generation X employees. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing from the achieving styles literature as well as the life course theory, this study first proposes hypotheses on specific differences in nine achieving styles. The authors tested by using data from 889 millennial employees and 364 millennial students from five cities in China. Findings: The results showed that the power direct achieving style stood out for the Chinese millennials, and the competitive direct achieving style ranked higher for Generation X. Moreover, millennial employees had higher scores for all nine achieving styles than millennial students. Practical implications: This study advises that when motivating Chinese millennial employees, human resource managers can create a competitive environment and provide career planning guidance, and that to better assist millennial university students to socialize, human resource managers can develop matched internship programs. Originality/value: The paper contributes to the life course literature and the achieving styles literature by comparing the differences among Chinese millennial employees, university students and Generation X.

While extensive research has investigated the consequences of humble leadership, its formation remains understudied. Integrating power dependence theory and regulatory focus theory, we propose a model in which supervisor outcome dependence serves as a mediator and supervisor prevention focus works as a moderator in the relationship between supervisor future orientation and subordinates’ perceptions of humble leadership. Our results from a multiwave, multisource field study indicate that supervisor future orientation positively influences humble leadership perceptions through supervisor outcome dependence. Moreover, this indirect effect is stronger among supervisors with high prevention focus. This study concludes by discussing the theoretical and practical implications for leadership development.