How Prosocial Motivation Is Related to Nurses’ Taking Charge at Work: A Multiwave, Multisource Survey and Two Cross-Sectional, Cross-National Surveys

Background: Prosocial motivation drives nurses to help patients, yet contemporary healthcare also requires proactive, change-oriented behaviors such as taking charge. How prosocial motivation translates into taking charge remains poorly understood. Aim: To investigate how and why prosocial motivation is related to nurses’ taking charge and how work overload moderates this process. Design: Study 1 employed a multiwave, multisource survey design. Studies 2 and 3 further tested the hypotheses using cross-sectional, cross-national designs. Methods: In Study 1, data were collected in a general hospital in China at three time points (two weeks apart) from 275 nurses and their immediate supervisors. Studies 2 and 3 further utilized cross-sectional designs, recruiting 636 and 441 nurses, respectively, from multiple countries via Prolific. Descriptive analyses, confirmatory factor analyses, and mediation and moderated mediation analyses were performed. Results: Nurses’ prosocial motivation was positively related to taking charge, mediated by general job reflective learning. Work overload moderated the positive association between prosocial motivation and reflective learning, and the indirect effect of prosocial motivation on taking charge via reflective learning was weaker under high work overload. Conclusion: Prosocial motivation was positively associated with nurses’ general job reflective learning, which in turn related to their taking charge. This highlights that nurse proactivity is not merely a spontaneous act of goodwill but a deliberate, self-regulated process. Moreover, the positive association between prosocial motivation and reflective learning was weaker under high workload. This suggests that prosocial motivation alone may not translate into taking charge when nurses lack the necessary cognitive resources needed for self-regulated learning. Implications for Nursing Management: This research provides a clear mandate for healthcare administrators: to harness the vast potential of their nursing workforce to advance patient care and organizational quality, organizations must not only cultivate prosocial motivation but also actively support reflective learning practice. Most critically, they must manage workloads to ensure nurses have the resources required to translate their prosocial motivation into effective action.