In recent years, there have been substantial changes in Japanese organizations. Symbolic of this is teleworking, which was rapidly introduced after the outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019(COVID- 19). In this study, we investigated how such a radical change in a long-time fixed workstyle in Japan affected employees’ malleability beliefs about their organization and their proactive behavior. Specifically, based on research on implicit theory of groups, we extended the scope of the study to organizations and conducted a cross-sectional survey of Japanese workers. The results indicated that the introduction of teleworking was positively correlated with employees’ proactive behavior, whether it was introduced before the outbreak of COVID-19 or not. This relationship was partially mediated by malleability beliefs about the organizational workstyle. Our study contributes to the studies on implicit theories by extending the theory to organizational contexts, and to the studies on teleworking by providing a possible effect of the introduction on employees’ proactive behavior.
https://ror.org/03mb27p64 
