Purpose – Family plays a vital role in shaping and influencing an individual's career. Although some studies focus on the negative aspects of the family-career domain, how to explore the potential positive relationship between employees’ family motivation and career growth deserves attention. In our study, drawing upon the wise proactivity perspective, we focus on making hypotheses about how family motivation influences career crafting and thus affects career growth. As a contextual factor, work-family balance plays a moderating role between family motivation and career crafting. Design/methodology/approach – To test this moderated mediation model, we conducted a set of in-depth interviews and time-lagged design. In the pre-test, we used a semi-structured method to interview a sample with work experience (N=21). In the formal study, we used a three-wave online survey and collect data from 244 employee in China. We test the proposed hypotheses by SPSS 26.0 and Mplus 8.3. Findings – Preliminary interview data demonstrated that family motivation is one of the reasons for self-initiative adjustment and change in the career path, and will affect subsequent career growth. In the formal study, the results show that individual family motivation positively affects career growth through the mediating role of career crafting. The effects of this pathway are amplified with high levels of work-family balance. Originality/value – Our study clarifies the mediating mechanism from family motivation to career growth from the wise proactivity perspective and expand the literature on career crafting. We extend the wise proactivity perspective into the family and career domain, which enriches the research on the antecedents of career growth. Moreover, we use the work-family perspective to supplement the person-context fit.
