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In the current war for talent employers are concerned about the idea that the best employees are more likely to leave the organization for another employer (i.e. the management paradox). This study tests this management paradox. The purpose of this paper is to advance our understandings of how employees’ occupational expertise is associated with job search intensity, through its assumed relationships with perceived internal and external employability in the internal and the external labor market. The authors thereby tested the research model across three different age groups (young, middle-aged, and senior employees).

The authors conducted a survey among 2,137 professional workers and applied multi-group structural equation modeling.

Perceived internal employability negatively mediated the relationship between occupational expertise and job search intensity, whilst there was a positive mediational effect of perceived external employability. Age had a moderating effect on the association between perceived internal employability and job search intensity.

The findings contribute to the scholarly literature on the management paradox, and the empirical work on employability and age.

Organizations can recoup their investments in expert workers’ employability and enhance their retention by providing opportunities for internal career development.

This study is original by including both internal and external employability. By doing so, the authors thereby shedding new light on how occupational expertise might explain job search and how this relationship differs depending on employee age, thereby using a large sample of respondents.

Sustainability intelligence is critical for the prosperity of societies worldwide, for conservation of the natural world, for achieving future business success and for the credibility of the concept of sustainability itself. This study aims to present the concept of sustainability intelligence by expounding on three proposed enablers shaping this concept – self-awareness, global perspective and societal consciousness. The main point of this paper is to conduct inquiry into the topic, gather information on enablers for sustainability intelligence and share that information with readers.

This study collected information from a pool of respondents to answer this research question: Which enablers are imperative to pursue sustainability intelligence? By using a sustainability intelligence questionnaire (SIQ), the authors argue why these enablers could bring about large-scale sustainable transformation and new insights about sustainable practices. The SIQ consists of 15 statements from strongly disagree to strongly agree, with five scale points, exploring the three enablers.

The findings show that the respondents gave the greatest importance to societal consciousness, followed by global perspective and then self-awareness as important enablers for sustainability intelligence. In line with previous studies, it is worth noting these enablers have reciprocal reinforcing relationships. While the proposed enablers for sustainability intelligence could prove a helpful catalyst, the authors believe it is necessary to secure an ongoing incisive critical approach towards enablers and competencies needed to positively impact the sustainable development goals.

We acknowledge there are some limitations using the current methodology. There is for example no control group. Also, this survey was only a-posteriori. It would be useful to execute a survey before the start of the academic year. Although we received some qualitative feedback linked to our research questions, it would be useful to add more in-depth qualitative research, by executing interviews with students. With these limitations, we recognize some room for improvement in our methodology.

This paper explores the wider practical implications of the sustainability intelligence enablers. The further development of the SIQ which might serve as an instrument that provides individual reports that highlight their unique skills and opportunities to shape a better world.

Career self‐directedness is a concept that has gained widespread attention in the literature on new careers and managerial thinking about contemporary career development. In a related sense, the topic of employee retirement has become popular in both the academic and managerial literature. However, to date, career self‐directedness has not been studied in relationship with older workers' retirement intentions. The purpose of this study is to test a model of the relationship between career self‐directedness and retirement intentions, mediated by career self‐management behaviors and engagement.

A survey was completed by 271 employees older than 45 working in five organizations. The average age was 53, and 59 percent were female. Participants had been with their current employer for an average of 16 years, and 58 percent of them worked fulltime. The survey included measures of self‐directed career attitude, career self‐management behaviors, engagement and retirement intention.

Results indicate that engagement and career self‐management behaviors fully mediated the relationship between self‐directed career attitude and retirement intention.

This is the first study to address career self‐directedness in relationship with retirement intentions, thereby considering the mediating role of career self‐management behaviors and engagement. As a result, this study contributes to insights in the validity of career self‐directedness as a predictor of career development using a sample of employees different from the main body of studies using samples of employees in their early career stages. Moreover, it sheds further light on the retirement process by including an individual career attitude and intermediating variables viewed as important to understand contemporary organizational behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between self-perceived employability resources and perceived psychological contract (PC) obligations. To examine the extent to which organizational ratings of potential, through their “signaling” function, might serve as a buffer between employability and PC perceptions that are undesirable from an employer's point of view.

Both self-report data (i.e. self-perceived employability resources and perceived PC obligations) and data reported by the HR departments of the participating organizations (i.e. organizational ratings of potential) were collected in a case-control design (n=103).

Self-perceived employability resources are not related to lower intentions to stay with one's current employer. High-potential employees did not perceive themselves as particularly obliged to reciprocate their organizations’ additional investments in them by expressing longer term loyalty, or a higher performance level.

Organizations should not be hesitant to assist their employees in enhancing their employability resources. In addition, they should engage in deliberate PC building with their high-potential employees so as to align their perceived PC obligations with the organizational agenda.

The relationship between self-perceived employability resources and perceived PC obligations has been underexamined; hardly any PC research has taken organizational variables into account; hardly any research exists on the psychological implications of being identified as a high potential; and the study draws both on self-report data and data reported by the HR departments of the participating organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to explore HR managers' and employees' views on the factors affecting employee retention using the perspective of the psychological contract.

Two studies were conducted. First, a sample of HR managers gave their view on the factors affecting employee retention and turnover and described their retention practices. Second, a large sample of employees reported on the importance attached to five types of employer inducements commonly regarded as retention factors, on their evaluation of these inducements and on their loyalty. Regression analysis was used to examine the impact of the delivery of employer inducements on retention.

The HR managers survey indicates that retention practices focus more on the factors believed to cause employee turnover (career opportunities and financial rewards) than on those believed to affect employee retention (social atmosphere, job content, work‐life balance). The focus on career opportunities is supported by the employee survey. The delivery of career opportunities had the strongest impact on employee loyalty while the impact of the delivery of financial rewards was much smaller.

It is useful to distinguish between different content dimensions of the psychological contract when studying its impact on employee outcomes. The psychological contract provides a relevant framework for studying employee retention.

This paper offers HR professionals' insights into the effectiveness of retention practices.

The paper shows how the psychological contract can be applied in retention management and examines impact of different content dimensions of the psychological contract on employee outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which employees' perceptions of alienation (personal and social) are related to positive (career satisfaction) and negative (careerist orientation) career‐related outcomes and to examine the mediating role of career satisfaction.

The paper used a cross‐sectional design, with questionnaires administered to 165 employees working in organizations in the USA to test the relationship between alienation and careerism through career satisfaction.

Alienation was found to be a positive predictor of employee careerism, and a negative predictor of their career satisfaction. The data were consistent with a model positioning career satisfaction as a mediator of the alienation to careerism relationship.

Future research should examine the relationship between alienation and career outcomes in other organizations and job families, to enhance generalizability. Data should be also collected longitudinally, to extend the current cross‐sectional design.

Understanding the empirical link between alienation and career outcomes can provide useful information to reduce negative career outcomes.

The findings point toward a positive relationship between employee alienation and their careerism. In doing so, the paper adds to a body of work where careerism was connected with structural rather than individual predictors.

The purpose of this paper is to explore professional employees' career move preferences and the impact of both individual and organizational career management. Departing from theoretical work on the “new career”, different types of career moves employees can make on the internal labor market are discussed and related to the literature on both organizational and individual career management.

To test the hypotheses, a cross‐sectional survey of 472 professional employees from one company is presented.

The preferences for both vertical career moves and moves relating to job enrichment and temporary moves are significantly affected by individual career management, but not by organizational career management practices. The preference for making lateral moves could not be explained by our antecedent variables.

Future research should involve a larger sample of organizations in order to collect empirical data about the extent to which OCM practices impact career preferences. Our results provide evidence for the relationship between individual career management and career move preferences and thereby adds to the literature on the “new career”.

This study has a number of practical implications that relate to the ways in which organizations can stimulate different career moves among their employees through the enhancement of personal career initiatives.

The value of this paper is the contribution it makes to the career literature by relating to different streams of research, about career mobility on the one hand and individual and organizational career management on the other.

The purpose of this study is two‐fold. The first is to relate the negative image of older workers to stereotype threat and to propose that effective retention management should start by replacing this negative image. The second is to assess the needs, perceptions and preferences of older workers regarding their career‐ending.

A total of 266 employer questionnaires and 1,290 older worker questionnaires identified the employers' perceptions of older workers and the career‐ending needs and preferences of older workers.

The results provide indirect support for the hypothesis that the negative image of older workers forms a self‐fulfilling prophecy due to the mechanisms of stereotype threat. Furthermore, the results indicate that job involvement plays a crucial role in the preference for retirement or to keep on working.

Stereotype threat promises to be very important when it comes to career‐ending measures for older workers. However, the empirical design of the study limits the possibility of drawing direct inferences about the effects of stereotype threat on older workers.

Measures and policies aimed at prolonging the participation of older workers at the labor market should be tailored to the specific needs, perceptions and preferences of older workers.

The concept of stereotype threat has never been connected with the perceptions of older workers. Further, the assessment of the needs, perceptions and preferences related to the career‐ending of older workers has never before been examined in a European study.

Given advances in digitalization and automation, manufacturing employees are facing the increasing threat of being substituted by smart machines and robots. The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework that explains as well as can be used to study career sustainability of workers in the fast-paced, continuously changing manufacturing landscape.

After tracing the evolution of manufacturing sector in China, the authors review existing literature on career sustainability and then propose a new framework. The authors then describe two fictive cases and illustrate the applicability of the four-dimensional framework in helping understand the lived experience of objects in these fictive cases.

The proposed dynamic framework of career sustainability constituted by four intricately interconnected dimensions (i.e. resourceful, flexible, renewable and integrative) is useful in understanding the fictive cases and hopefully will guide future research on career sustainability in manufacturing or similarly fast-past, dynamically changing environments.

The framework of career sustainability facilitates manufacturing employees to accurately evaluate the sustainability of their careers, whereby they can choose to continue, shift or re-orient their career paths during the transitional period toward digitalized manufacturing; it also enlightens employers to think about how to enhance the job security and engagement of workers by helping prolong their careers and re-design their career plans.

This paper proposes a novel yet context-specific framework to understand and study sustainability of careers. In addition to helping us understand how careers evolve during transformational periods, it also offers fruitful avenues for further research.

In today’s highly competitive business environment, all functions in an organization are increasingly expected to justify their existence by the contribution they make to that organization’s competitive advantage. This is especially true for administrative functions: traditional perceptions must be overcome and effectiveness successfully “marketed” internally. This article looks at perceptions of HR effectiveness and argues that such perceptions challenge HR departments to think and operate strategically.