Jon P. Briscoe

The “new career” and organizational commitment: Do boundaryless and protean attitudes make a difference?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to establish whether positive or negative relationships exist between boundaryless and protean career attitudes (respectively) and organizational commitment and whether such relationships can be moderated by development opportunities.Design/methodology/approach – Surveys from 212 part‐time MBAs were analyzed using correlation, regression, or moderated multiple regression to explore relationships between boundaryless career attitudes (boundaryless mindset, organizational mobility), protean career attitudes (self‐directed career management, values‐driven career management), organizational commitment (affective, continuance and normative), and development opportunities.Findings – Only organizational mobility preference was correlated (negatively) with each type of commitment. Boundaryless mindset was moderated in its relationship to normative commitment in that lower development opportunities resulted in lower commitment for those with higher levels of boundaryless mind...

An alternative approach and new guidelines for practice

Generally three approaches are used to create competency models. Given future business needs, particularly in industries experiencing turbulent change, still another approach is needed, one that is learning-based. Guidelines for those companies developing executive competencies are given.

Career transitions and their causes: A country-comparative perspective

This empirical paper investigates how individuals conceptualize causes of career transitions, focusing on the three European countries of Austria, Serbia, and Spain in comparison to the USA and China. Collectively, these countries represent four separate cultural regions according to Schwartz. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with members of three occupational groups: business people, nurses, and blue-collar workers. Analysis of the data generates greater insight about the existence of both region-specific patterns as well as potentially universalistic tendencies regarding perceived causes of career transitions. Perceptions of internal (to the person) drivers of career transitions as activating forces are evident in all five countries. The overall results support contemporary notions of occupational careers that are highly individualized, a characterization strongly emphasized in the current career literature. In the European culture clusters, causes of career transitions are attributed internally and externally. China, representing the Confucian cultural region, stresses external causes for career transitions. By contrast, in the USA only internal attributions of causes are reported.

Career success across 11 countries: implications for international human resource management

This qualitative study examines perceived meanings of career success across 11 countries. The results show that people define career success in ways that enrich and illuminate the basic dichotomy of objective and subjective career success and establish their relative strengths across countries. Juxtaposing our data with human resource management (HRM) practices, we contribute to the universalist versus contextualist debate in HRM by adding the career management angle. We shed light on the relative importance of cultural and institutional factors for HRM in the area of careers and add a global perspective to the discussion about agentic careers. In our discussion we offer practical suggestions for multinational companies including how to individualize HRM to address diverse views of career success.

Employee Reactions to Job Insecurity in a Declining Economy: A Longitudinal Study of the Mediating Role of Job Embeddedness

In the context of the Great Recession, we examined the relationships among perceptions of job insecurity, job embeddedness, and important individual work outcomes. Specifically, we tested the role of job embeddedness as a mediator between job insecurity and the withdrawal outcomes of intention to remain and job search behavior. Results of a longitudinal study of 115 working adults indicated that perceptions of job embeddedness fully mediated the relationship between perceptions of job insecurity and intention to remain and partially mediated job insecurity’s relationship with job search behavior.

Using Protean Career Attitude to Facilitate a Positive Approach to Unemployment

The rise in unemployment rates associated with the global financial crisis mean that a timely understanding is needed of the ways in which a person’s career attitude influences their reactions to job loss. Much of the research into unemployment has focused on what people lose during unemployment rather than what people can potentially gain during unemployment. In this paper, we deliberately adopt a “positive deviance” approach (Marsh et al., British Medical Journal, 329:1177–1179, 2004) to unemployment and study the attitudes and behaviors that enable people to find successful solutions during job loss. Specifically, we suggest that protean career attitude is a positive factor that can be built upon during unemployment to enhance successful re-employment. The chapter outlines a 6-month longitudinal study that assesses the influence of protean career attitude on self esteem, job search, re-employment, career growth and job improvement. By studying the positive processes through which people positively deviate during unemployment, we can offer unemployed people new ways to create change for themselves.

The Protean and Boundaryless Career in Italy: Game on?

In the last thirty years many scholars have realized that careers have lost their linearity and associated predictability.

Career Success in Different Countries: Reflections on the 5C Project

Career studies have, at best, partly kept pace with the enormous rise of international work. While on virtually all accounts such as volume of international business transactions, importance of organizations operating across national and cultural boundaries or individuals pursuing an international or global career indicators point towards growth, the body of career-related research on this has not grown to the same extent. With the exception of expatriation and its various facets such as classic expatriation (Bader et al. 2016), self-initiated expatriation (Andresen et al. 2013) or migration (Solimano 2010), systematic research about various aspects of careers in different countries and cultures, in particular in a comparative sense (Lazarova et al. 2012), has only started to emerge.

Finding the “I” in “Team”: The Role of Teams in Clarifying and Optimizing Calling

Extant literature on the phenomenon of calling is primarily focused on individual factors. The role of others, particularly those within work teams, is largely unexplored despite the likelihood tha...