Subjective career success: A meta-analytic review

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2014.06.001Get rights and content

Highlights

  • •

    This study meta-analyzed the predictors of subjective career success (SCS).

  • •

    It examines six groups of career hurdles which potentially lower people's SCS.

  • •

    Trait-related and motivational hurdles were found to be associated with lower SCS.

  • •

    Social and organizational hurdles were also associated with lower SCS.

  • •

    Background-related and skill-related hurdles were not associated with SCS.

Abstract

This study proposes that employees have to face a variety of obstacles over the course of their careers, each of which can create stress for employees and, in so doing, lower their subjective career success (SCS). Using a meta-analysis of 216 samples published over the past three decades (N = 94,090), we found that career hurdles associated with dispositional traits (e.g., low emotional stability), motivation (e.g., low work engagement), social networks (e.g. low supervisor support), and organizational and job support (e.g., job insecurity) were all significantly related to lower SCS. Counter to expectations, background-related hurdles (e.g., being female) and skill-related hurdles (e.g., lack of job changes and international experience) were not significantly related to SCS.

Section snippets

Emergence of the construct

A career is the unfolding sequence of a person's work experiences over time and across multiple jobs, organizations, and occupations (Arthur et al., 1989, Feldman, 1989). As noted above, subjective career success (SCS) refers to individuals' perceptual evaluations of, and affective reactions to, their careers (Greenhaus et al., 1990, Turban and Dougherty, 1994). As early as the 1950s, social scientists observed considerable variance in how individuals viewed their own career success (Gattiker

Career hurdles: a conservation of resources theory perspective

As individuals compare what they have achieved relative to their career goals (Greenhaus et al., 1990), they consider not only the goals they have reached but also the goals they are still striving toward and/or now know they cannot achieve (Korman et al., 1981). The major deindustrialization of manufacturing in the 1970s and the downsizing of middle management in the 1980s and 1990s led to the career landscape becoming less stable and less predictable than it had been previously. The deep

Background-related hurdles

Individuals' backgrounds can create either starter advantages or disadvantages in launching careers. For instance, individuals with low socioeconomic origins might have fewer opportunities to get into more expensive and/or higher-quality schools, which in turn limit their placement options after they graduate (Kalmin, 1994). Being female and non-Caucasian have historically lowered the odds of obtaining desired jobs or promotions because of discrimination and negative stereotypes (Kirchmeyer,

Method

We performed a comprehensive search for studies that examined SCS. We searched such databases as EBSCOHost, Emerald, Factiva, JSTOR, Oxford Journals, Proquest, PsycINFO, ScienceDirect, Sage Full-Text Collections, and Wiley InterScience, along with unpublished studies and dissertations in databases like Digital Dissertation Consortium (Rosenthal, 1979). All the studies we identified in our search were field studies, thereby anchoring our findings in real-world contexts. (We excluded studies that

Results

We utilized Raju, Burke, Normand, and Langlois's (1991) meta-analysis techniques to examine the data in this study. Table 2 presents the corrected effect sizes for the relationships of SCS with each set of correlates. (We did not include results in these tables when there were fewer than three studies measuring a particular correlate.)

Hypothesis 1 predicted that background-related hurdles would be associated with lower SCS. We found no support for this hypothesis; as seen in Table 2, the effect

Discussion

This study contributes to the literature on subjective career success above and beyond Ng, Eby, Sorensen, and Feldman's (2005) meta-analysis in several ways. First, the prior review examined the factors which enhance career success. On the contrary, our study focuses on career hurdles rather than the factors that drive career success; this approach allows us to address very different questions than Ng et al. (2005) did. For example, while Ng et al. (2005) used the contest-mobility and

Conclusion

Career development has become one of the most important human resource management activities in organizations today (Maurer, Pierce, & Lynn, 2002). As different kinds of career paths continue to emerge, individuals' career self-management and its impact on SCS are becoming increasingly prominent concerns for organizations and employees alike. We hope future researchers will consider not only the factors which promote SCS, but also the obstacles that undermine it. To that end, conservation of

References (102)

  • T. Tsaousides et al.

    Perceived career compromise, affect, and work-related satisfaction in college students

    Journal of Vocational Behavior

    (2008)
  • M. Verbruggen et al.

    Can career self-directedness be improved through counselling?

    Journal of Vocational Behavior

    (2008)
  • H. Zacher

    Career adaptability predicts subjective career success above and beyond personality traits and core self-evaluations

    Journal of Vocational Behavior

    (2014)
  • A.E. Abele et al.

    How do objective and subjective career success interrelate over time?

    Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology

    (2009)
  • T.D. Allen et al.

    Career benefits associated with mentoring for proteges: A meta-analysis

    Journal of Applied Psychology

    (2004)
  • S. Ang et al.

    Human capital and institutional determinants of information technology compensation: Modeling multilevel and cross-level interactions

    Management Science

    (2002)
  • M. Armstrong-Stassen et al.

    Perceived organizational support, career satisfaction, and the retention of older workers

    Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology

    (2009)
  • M.B. Arthur et al.

    Career success in a boundaryless career world

    Journal of Organizational Behavior

    (2005)
  • M.B. Arthur et al.

    The boundaryless career as a new employment principle

  • S. Aryee et al.

    An examination of the antecedents of subjective career success among a managerial sample in Singapore

    Human Relations

    (1994)
  • J.B. Avery et al.

    Psychological capital: A positive resource for combating employee stress and turnover

    Human Resource Management

    (2009)
  • G. Becker

    Human capital: A theoretical and empirical analysis with special reference to education

    (1964)
  • G.S. Benson et al.

    You paid for the skills, now keep them: Tuition reimbursement and voluntary turnover

    Academy of Management Journal

    (2004)
  • T. Biemann et al.

    The impact of international experience on objective and subjective career success in early careers

    International Journal of Human Resource Management

    (2013)
  • R.L. Blankenship

    Organizational careers: An interactionist perspective

    Sociological Quarterly

    (1973)
  • J.M. Brett et al.

    Jumping ship: Who benefits from an external labor market career strategy?

    Journal of Applied Psychology

    (1997)
  • C.M. Brotheridge et al.

    Testing a conservation of resources model of the dynamics of emotional labor

    Journal of Occupational Health Psychology

    (2002)
  • E. Bullock-Yowell et al.

    Relationships among career and life stress, negative career thoughts, and career decision state: A cognitive information processing perspective

    Career Development Quarterly

    (2011)
  • D.M. Cable et al.

    Tournaments versus sponsored mobility as determinants of job search success

    Academy of Management Journal

    (1999)
  • M.A. Campion et al.

    Career-related antecedents and outcomes of job rotation

    Academy of Management Journal

    (1994)
  • P. Cappelli et al.

    Why some jobs command wage premiums: A test of career tournament and internal labor market hypotheses

    Academy of Management Journal

    (1991)
  • D.S. Carlson et al.

    Differences in promotion stress across career stage and orientation

    Human Resource Management

    (2001)
  • S.J. Ceci

    How much does schooling influence general intelligence and its cognitive components? A reassessment of the evidence

    Developmental Psychology

    (1991)
  • D.S. Chiaburu et al.

    Do peers make the place? Conceptual synthesis and meta-analyses of coworker effects on perceptions, attitudes, OCBs, and performance

    Journal of Applied Psychology

    (2008)
  • J.S. Coleman

    Foundations of social theory

    (1990)
  • R.J. Defillippi et al.

    The boundaryless career: A competency-based perspective

    Journal of Organizational Behavior

    (1994)
  • M.K. Duffy et al.

    Social undermining in the workplace

    Academy of Management Journal

    (2002)
  • L.S. Dyke et al.

    How we define success: A qualitative study of what matters most to women and men

    Sex Roles: A Journal of Research

    (2006)
  • T.K. Eith et al.

    Career success perception and work-related behavior of employees in geriatric care — A pilot study in a German geriatric care facility

    Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences

    (2011)
  • P.M. Elsass et al.

    Individual responses to the stress of career plateauing

    Journal of Management

    (1989)
  • B. Erdogan et al.

    Work value congruence and intrinsic career success: The compensatory roles of leader–member exchange and perceived organizational support

    Personnel Psychology

    (2004)
  • A. Erez et al.

    Relationships of core self-evaluations to goal setting, motivation, and performance

    Journal of Applied Psychology

    (2001)
  • D.C. Feldman

    Careers in organizations: Recent trends and future directions

    Journal of Management

    (1989)
  • U.E. Gattiker et al.

    Subjective career success: A study of managers and support personnel

    Journal of Business and Psychology

    (1986)
  • M. Granovetter

    The strength of weak ties

    American Journal of Sociology

    (1973)
  • J.H. Greenhaus et al.

    Effects of race on organizational experiences, job performance evaluations, and career outcomes

    Academy of Management Journal

    (1990)
  • J.H. Greenhaus et al.

    When work and family are allies: A theory of work–family enrichment

    Academy of Management Review

    (2006)
  • S. Grimland et al.

    Career attitudes and success of managers: The impact of chance event, protean, and traditional careers

    International Journal of Human Resource Management

    (2012)
  • H.P. Gunz et al.

    Reconceptualizing career success

    Journal of Organizational Behavior

    (2005)

    • Cited by (288)

    • Ambition and subjective career success: A nonlinear relationship

      2024, Personality and Individual Differences

    • Workplace hurdles and innovative behavior: A meta-analysis

      2024, Journal of Vocational Behavior

    • Crafting networks: A self-training intervention

      2024, Journal of Vocational Behavior

    • Preparing for the future : relationship between career orientation, proactive career behaviors and career satisfaction

      2023, Psychologie du Travail et des Organisations

    • The effect of adverse employment circumstances on physical pain: Evidence from Australian panel data

      2023, Preventive Medicine

    • Assessing subjective career success: the role of career commitment, career resilience and self-efficacy: a evidence from hospitality industry

      2024, International Journal of Quality and Service Sciences
    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text
    Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.