This review examines competing perspectives relating to (a) the range and prevalence of different theoretical approaches to the study of career success and (b) the need for a theoretically ...differentiated understanding of the antecedents of objective career success (OCS) versus subjective career success (SCS). Furthermore, the review complements the assumption that OCS and SCS are only ultimate outcomes of careers, proposing instead that career success also acts as an antecedent to other career and life outcomes. Against the backdrop of an organizing resource management framework, we present and critically evaluate the results of a systematic analysis of the theoretical approaches used to empirically study the antecedents of OCS and SCS. Furthermore, we develop a taxonomy of outcomes of career success. Our review findings show a theoretical heterogeneity with some dominant theoretical approaches within research of antecedents of career success. Moreover, past research started to adopt different theoretical approaches when predicting OCS (e.g., approaches focusing on personal resources, such as human capital or competitive performance) versus SCS (e.g., approaches focusing on personal key resources, such as stable traits). Several types of career success outcomes were identified: withdrawal, career attitudes, health and well-being, reactions from the (work) environment, and self-concept. On the basis of these findings, we provide recommendations for how future research can make sense of the theoretical heterogeneity in career success research, how research on antecedents and outcomes can better account for the OCS/SCS distinction, and how future research can more rigorously integrate research on antecedents and outcomes of career success.
Political skills are an important factor in promoting career success. Although some scholars have paid attention to the relationship between political skills and some dimensions of career success, ...few have explored a complete framework of career success and its relationship with political skills. In this study, the meta-analysis technique is used to integrate 141 studies containing 209 effect values (N = 57,406) from 2004 to 2020 to create a quantitative review of the relationship between political skills and career success. The results show that political skills are significantly correlated with career success, with a medium effect value (d = 0.289). Compared with objective career success (d = 0.256), political skills have a stronger predictive effect on subjective career success (d = 0.325). The moderating effect test finds that there are certain differences in the correlation between political skills and career success across different cultures, industries, and groups. The predictive effect of political skills on career success is higher in eastern than in western cultures, higher in the tertiary sector than in the secondary sector, and higher at the management level than at the employee level. This study explores the influence of political skills on career success and its dimensions and proposes management implications.
Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2021.1949626 .
Objective and subjective criteria are essential measures of organizational success. However, prior studies ignored these criteria when assessing employees’ career success. This study aims to examine ...the impact of HRM practices and employee behavior on career success for employees in the Greater Amman Municipality. This study adopted a survey for data collection, as 375 questionnaires were distributed to employees working at Greater Amman Municipality in Jordan. Four weeks were given to respondents to complete the survey. After the allotted time had passed, 246 questionnaires had been gathered, with a response rate of 65.6%. Of these, 246 questionnaires were deemed suitable for further analysis. Convenience sampling has been used as a key technique for collecting data. For data analysis, SPSS (version 25) and SmartPLS (version 3.3.9) statistical software were used. The findings indicated that objective and subjective criteria significantly affect career success. The results also showed that HRM practices and employee behavior significantly and positively influenced career success. Furthermore, employee behavior mediated the relationship between HRM practices and career success. Since each facet reflects a significant and distinctive component of career success, academics and researchers should focus on both the objective and subjective dimensions of career success.
We draw on the conservation of resources theory to examine how upward and horizontal career transitions contribute to both objective and subjective career success among a longitudinal sample, ...covering the first 10 to 15 years of their career. Further, we adopt socioemotional-selective theory to investigate how upward and horizontal career transitions contribute differently to career success from a lifespan perspective. Latent growth curve analysis revealed that increases in upward and horizontal career transitions over time were positively related to increases in objective career success and positively related to subjective career success. As expected, the positive effect of horizontal transitions on objective career success was stronger for younger individuals. Contrary to our expectations, upward transitions had a stronger effect on the objective career success of older individuals. We found no age effects on subjective career success. This study helps to further our understanding of how different types of career movements contribute to career success, and the types of transitions that are important for individuals of different ages.
•Little research attention has been paid to career transitions from a lifespan perspective.•This longitudinal research examines the impact of upward and horizontal career transitions for career success.•Results showed that both types of transitions are important to achieve career success over time.•Horizontal transitions had a stronger impact on younger individuals' salary progression.•Upward transitions had a stronger impact on older individuals' salary progression.
The mid-career stage is marked by a wider diversity of roles and responsibility in work and non-work life domains. To attain career success, mid-career workers cannot solely depend on their ...organization for information, skills, and training. Integrating career construction (Savickas, 2002) and conservation of resources (Hobfoll, 1989) perspectives, we developed a model linking perceived organizational support (POS), perceived spousal support, career adaptability, and subjective and objective indicators of career success. We tested the model using a sample of 160 independent employee-supervisor dyads across three measurement periods over two years. Results revealed that (a) POS was indirectly related to both subjective and objective career success via career adaptability; (b) perceived spousal support was indirectly related to both subjective and objective career success via career adaptability; and (c) the conditional indirect effects of POS in predicting subjective and objective career success via career adaptability were stronger for employees with high as opposed to low levels of perceived spousal support. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
•Examined how work and non-work support resources predict career success in midlife.•POS and perceived spousal support impact career success via career adaptability.•Perceived spousal support moderated the link between POS and career adaptability.
Positive perceptions of career success are critical among accounting professionals, given their connection with performance, turnover and organisational commitment. Drawing on career stage theory, ...this study explores the perceptions and experiences of career success among 475 aspiring (Accounting/Finance students), 305 early career accountants (ECAs) and 165 managers/recruiters in Australia. Findings reflected both objective and subjective dimensions of career success alongside notable differences between aspiring accountants and ECAs, highlighting shifting views across the career stages of exploration and establishment. While ECAs were largely positive about their access to career success, managers/recruiters identified ways to create further opportunities for ECAs' career success.
Cultural values and definitions of career success Benson, George S.; McIntosh, Cheryl K.; Salazar, Maritza ...
Human resource management journal,
July 2020, 2020-07-00, 20200701, Letnik:
30, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This paper examines how national culture relates to the ways that individuals define career success. Data are drawn from interviews with 269 professional services employees in 15 countries. ...Interviews are content coded and linked with country‐level Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness measures of cultural values. We test our hypotheses using a multilevel multinomial logit model. The results demonstrate that the ways in which employees define career success vary across countries, due in part to differences in cultural values after controlling for gender, occupation, job level, and national economic development. We find that employees from countries high in future orientation, uncertainty avoidance, and performance orientation are more likely to define career success in terms of interpersonal outcomes, and those from countries high in collectivism (institutional and in‐group), humane orientation, and gender egalitarianism are more likely to prefer intrapersonal outcomes. We find that employees from countries that are high in assertiveness, uncertainty avoidance, and performance orientation are more likely to define career success in terms of achievement‐oriented outcomes. Finally, we find that employees from countries high in power distance report career success definitions in terms of safety and security outcomes. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of cultural differences in careers across countries.
Increasing dynamics of careers make the development and application of different career resources important for successful career development. The study aimed to understand how different career ...resources are related to each other and different forms of career success. Examining 574 employees with 3-waves of 1-month time lags, we assessed relations between key resources (i.e., self-esteem and optimism), career adaptability resources (i.e., concern, control, curiosity, confidence), and knowledge/skills, motivational, and environmental career resources and their predictive utility for different forms of subjective and objective career success (i.e., salary). Results showed that career adaptability resources are highly related to other types of career resources, but career adaptability and other career resources each explain unique variance in different facets of career success. Using relative weight analyses, we found that especially motivational and environmental career resources are meaningfully positively related to different facets of subjective career success, whereas knowledge and skills career resources are most prominently positively related to objective career success. Under consideration of other career resources, career adaptability related negatively to salary. The findings contribute to career construction theory by situating career adaptability within a broader resource framework in relation to career success.
•We consider career adaptability (CA) resources in a broader resource framework.•CFA support the theoretically presumed distinction between CA and other career resources.•Subjective career success (SCS) was assessed with a multidimensional measurement.•Objective career success (OCS) was assessed in terms of salary.•We found incremental utility of different career resources for SCS and OCS beyond CA.
Entrepreneurship has become an attractive career option for both the young and the old, but age has not been thoroughly examined as a variable of interest among entrepreneurship scholars. In this ...review, we present 12 theoretical perspectives regarding the effect of age on entrepreneurs' success and our critiques. We then present results of an exploratory meta-analysis with effect sizes from 102 samples. The results show that age has a weak, positive linear relationship with overall entrepreneurial success, but it does exhibit signs of a U-shaped relationship, with the relationship being negative among younger samples but positive among older samples. The positive effect size becomes more pronounced when more females are included in the sample. The effect size of age does not differ by entrepreneurs' tenure running the firm. In terms of the type of success measures, age has a negative effect on growth but a positive effect on subjective success, firm size, and financial success, and no effect on survival. We compare our results with previous meta-analyses on employees' age to show the uniqueness of entrepreneurs' careers and we offer suggestions for future studies.
The work population is aging, and entrepreneurship has become an attractive career option for both the young and the old. Age has often been included in empirical studies as a control variable to predict entrepreneurs' success, but with inconsistent empirical findings and inadequate attention to age's theoretical role, it is not clear whether older entrepreneurs are as successful as their younger counterparts.
The current study has two related components. First, we provided a much-needed review of the alternative theoretical perspectives on the effect of age on entrepreneurial success. These 12 perspectives focused on various age-related mechanisms, namely personal health, rigidity, risk propensity, time's value, discrimination, human capital, social capital, financial capital, emotion, life stages, family obligation, and gender stereotype. We found that explicit theoretical explanations are rare and fragmented for addressing entrepreneurs' age-success relationship. Most of the existing perspectives are simplistic, equivocal, and sometimes contradictory. Guided by the above review, we proposed several research questions about several contingency factors, such as the entrepreneur's life stage, gender, and tenure running the business, which would help us gain a more nuanced understanding of the age-success relationship.
Second, we empirically examined the research questions in an exploratory meta-analysis based on 102 independent samples. Indeed, we found more nuanced results than are typically apparent. The results show that age has a weak, positive linear relationship with overall entrepreneurial success (ρ̂=0.02), but it does exhibit signs of a U-shaped relationship, with the relationship being negative among younger samples but positive among older samples. The positive effect size becomes more pronounced when more females are included in the sample, suggesting female entrepreneurs' chance of success is higher at later life stages. The effect size of age does not differ by entrepreneurs' tenure running the firm, thus ruling out the possibility that the age-success effect is primarily driven by tenure effect or selection bias.
We performed some robustness checks for the meta-analytic results. We found age's effect is not affected by the study's publication year, but the effect differs across the world. In terms of the type of success measures, we found age has a negative effect on growth, but a positive effect on subjective success, firm size, and financial success, and no effect on firm survival. Older entrepreneurs tend to have larger businesses, so older entrepreneurs are “punished” for having a larger denominator in the calculation of growth, putting them in an unfair position if growth is the sole measure of success.
We compared our results with previous meta-analyses on employees' age, and one clear distinction is that previous meta-analyses reported an inverted U-shaped relationship between employees' age and overall performance, while our study shows the opposite, U-shaped relationship between entrepreneurs' age and success. This difference is probably due to the fact that entrepreneurial careers involve different resource commitments, job requirements, and success criteria compared to traditional careers, making people at a specific age more likely to succeed in one career but not in the other.
Our study shows that researchers need to rethink the theoretical role of age, account for potentially simultaneous operation of theoretical mechanisms, and identify new research directions. We call for more studies to address the unique promises and challenges entrepreneurs in each life stage will face, and we provided some suggestions to increase the rigor of future studies. It is imperative to study the intra-individual aging effect through tracking a large cohort of entrepreneurs over decades with repeated measures of their cognitive intelligence, motivations, role identities, and success. Because male entrepreneurs outnumber female entrepreneurs, it is necessary to oversample female entrepreneurs or seek a matched sample, so that any gender-related differential effects can be demonstrated fully. Because many entrepreneurs work in teams, future studies can compare founding teams of the same age (e.g., college classmates) and teams of different ages, and investigate how members of each type of team can collaborate to maximize their chance of success.
•We review theoretical perspectives regarding the effect of age on entrepreneurs’ success and perform a meta-analysis.•Age has a weak linear relationship and a possible U-shaped relationship with success.•Age’s effect is more positive among female entrepreneurs.•Age’ s effect differs by success measure and country, but not by publication year or tenure running the firm.
This mixed methods study investigated differences in men's and women's career success in the events industry. A "glass slipper" of success was identified that aligns more readily with some ...bodies/people than others. An online survey tested the extent to which
this glass slipper "fits" men and women. Results illustrate that men are more successful than women on all measures, indicating that the glass slipper of success is gendered. Interviews were used to explore experiences of success (or otherwise) and to investigate the workings of
the glass slipper. Women were often aware of their lack of fit, whereas men did not recognize the gendered norms that make it easier for them to have their merit acknowledged and rewarded. The gendered glass slipper contributes to ongoing gender inequality in the events industry, making it
harder for women to be recognized???by themselves and others???as successful in their careers.
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