Search results

The purpose of this paper is to develop a new conceptualization of the boundaryless career – a widely acknowledged contemporary career concept – that reflects its original description more fully than previous literature has done, and to apply this conceptualization in an empirical investigation of career behavior and intentions of a large sample of European information technology (IT) professionals.

As part of a large study of IT professionals in Europe (N=1,350), the paper had three research objectives. First, the paper developed and empirically tested a new operationalization of a person’s boundaryless career orientation (BCO) that reflects the originally proposed boundaryless career meanings more closely than existing approaches. Second, the paper used this to identify in a holistic manner different patterns of BCO. Third, the paper examined the nature and extent of links between BCO and self-reported career behavior and intentions.

The paper identified five BCO factors that differentiate individuals into three distinct clusters. Although organizational boundaries appeared to be salient for most individuals, they did not differentiate the clusters. Instead, geographical mobility preference and rejection of career opportunities emerged as highly differentiating but hitherto rarely examined types of career boundaries.

The findings can help HR managers to gain a better understanding of different mobility preferences among different groups of employees, which could lead to the development and implementation of more refined reward schemes and career development practices in organizations.

This study provides a new operationalization of the BCO that is grounded in its original definition and offers a new empirically tested 15-item BCO measure. It contributes to career research with scarce empirical findings regarding the components of the BCO, their salience for individuals, and the connections between BCO and behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on a broad body of work that responds to the boundaryless career concept, first introduced in 1993, and to anticipate new theory-building and research.

Covers the origination of the concept, its meaning and definition, the underlying influence of an earlier group of careers scholars from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the importance of an interdisciplinary perspective.

Identifies three categories of activity – involving internal debates, fresh theoretical contributions, and new collaborative opportunities – that have occurred citing boundaryless career scholarship.

Suggests how scholars can build on the legacy of both organizational and boundaryless careers research in their future work.

Links between foundational MIT work on careers, boundaryless careers and current debates to suggests future research directions.

This study investigates the relationship between “new career” profiles (Briscoe and Hall, 2006) and two sets of career factors: agency (i.e. career commitment, self-efficacy, and work locus of control), and career attitudes (i.e. salience and satisfaction). Thus, the purpose of this paper is to understand whether career profiles are a valuable way to understand careers in the modern career era, and if so, which profiles exist, and what differences exist across the profiles.

The participants in this study were 1,987 managers and professionals, recruited from a large database of potential respondents. Cluster analysis determined which profiles were apparent among the participants through a two-step clustering procedure using the Bayesian information criterion algorithm. The authors then compared the clusters using analysis of variance (ANOVA) with cluster membership as the independent variable and the career agency and attitude variables and age as the dependent variables.

Cluster analysis of the protean and boundaryless career attitudes of 1,987 respondents identified three career profiles: Trapped/Lost, Protean Career Architects, and Solid Citizens. ANOVA confirmed that people indicative of the three profiles differed significantly on all study variables. The findings suggest that the three different career profiles predict important differences in career variables and outcomes that are relevant to individual progression and growth needs and may be a valuable way to study contemporary careers. In particular, the person-centred approach acknowledges that the protean and boundaryless career concepts are related though distinct concepts that can be combined to show that individuals vary in the degree to which their career orientations are consistent with contemporary career constructs.

The authors have demonstrated that career profiles are a meaningful way to categorize career actors on the basis of their career orientation, as well as their scores on a host of important career variables. Although the study benefits from a large sample and a valid measure of career profiles, it does have some limitations. First, the authors relied on self-reported data gathered on a single survey questionnaire. Furthermore, because the study is cross-sectional, the authors cannot examine the long-term impact of career profile on outcomes such as career satisfaction or if career profiles are enduring or malleable over time.

From a practical perspective, it may be incumbent on organizations, career counsellors and individuals to develop an awareness to which career profile individuals belong (DeFillippi and Arthur, 1996). Doing so may offer insight into the likely challenges that career actors will face as their career unfolds, and ideally help individuals develop career management strategies to create career growth, rather than a more passive and reactive approach. A number of implications for each of the three career profiles are offered within the paper.

Utilizing a two-step clustering procedure, the authors provide empirical evidence of three of the 16 career profiles proposed by Briscoe and Hall (2006): Trapped/Lost, Protean Career Architects and Solid Citizens. Next, the authors explored the utility of the profiles for career development and demonstrated significant differences in career-related psychological factor and attitudes across profiles. Finally, the authors take a person-centric approach to career orientation, allowing for individual differences in career enactment. Overall, the results of this study show that career profiles are a highly useful composite that reflect important patterns relative to new career variables.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between proactive personality (PP), goal orientation (GO), meta-skills and the underlying dimensions of protean (self-directed and value-driven) and boundaryless (boundaryless mobility and mobility preference) career attitudes among Indian IT professionals.

Data were collected from 600 IT professionals working in six IT companies in the Delhi-NCR (National Capital Region) in India. Structural equation modeling was used to validate the measures of the selected constructs and for testing the hypothesis.

The results of the study revealed that PP significantly affects individuals’ protean and boundaryless career attitudes. Moreover, GO significantly affects protean career attitudes, and meta-skill significantly affects boundaryless mobility, respectively.

The study serves as a guide for the HR managers to devise the company’s strategies keeping in mind the employees’ requirements in parallel with the policies for IT industries in India.

The study enriches the protean and boundaryless career literature by identifying and empirically establishing the relationship between various personality traits and career patterns opted in the context of the Indian IT industry.

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.

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.

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 mindset.

The study is limited due to sample nature and the lack of longitudinal design. Also, it does not provide implications for other types of commitment that may be impacted by career attitudes and development opportunities (occupational commitment, for example).

A counterintuitive finding but important implication from this research is that employers should not assume that protean and boundaryless employees (respectively) will be less committed to the organization. Another practical finding is that developmental opportunities, while important to all employees, did not generally make employees with protean and boundaryless attitudes more committed to their organization.

The paper is the first, to one's knowledge, to assess organizational commitment with specific measures of boundaryless and protean career attitudes. While the results are simple, they refute many stereotypes of the new career and, in that sense, add an important perspective to the career literature.

With changing employment conditions, technological advancement, frequent manpower reduction and global competition, the relevance of the protean and boundaryless career concepts is increasing. With this, the country’s culture plays a pivotal role in career choice. The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate protean and boundaryless career scales for college passing out students and in the Indian context. The protean career scale was measured by self-directed and values-driven dimensions, while the boundaryless career scale was measured by boundaryless mindset and organizational mobility preference.

The first step involved defining construct and determining face validity. The data collected via questionnaire from India’s final year engineering students were subjected to exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis in the second and third steps, respectively. Finally, the nomological validity was tested by establishing the relationship between factors influencing career choice and newly developed protean and boundaryless career.

The result suggested using a two-factor model with a protean career (combining self-directed and values-driven items) and a boundaryless career as a separate construct for college passing out students.

The developed scale has nine items that can be used to conduct surveys at the time of campus hiring by academic scholars, HR managers, and practitioners who are working on the identification, development and management of human talent as a part of any human resource management system.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first approach to developing the protean and boundaryless career scale for college passing out students and in the Indian context which can be replicable for South Asian countries.

The purpose of this paper is to further develop Global Talent Management (GTM) and the career literature by conceptualizing a model that uses widely discussed contemporary career concepts such as boundaryless career, protean career and kaleidoscope career, with a special focus on gender issues and contextual impact factors. This model contributes to the understanding of how GTM in multinational enterprises (MNEs) can be designed to fit lifelong career courses and to reduce talent scarcity by increasing the deployment of female talent.

The authors develop a theoretical model of a talent’s lifelong development of career orientations, and draw insights from many discreet literature bases. Through a review of the relevant literature, this paper synthesizes a holistic approach to understand why MNEs need a tailor-made GTM with a particular focus on gender and a life phase-specific career orientation with strong local responsiveness.

The Dynamic Career Cube is a hermeneutic model that helps to visualize the individual career course of talented employees and the fit of talent’s career orientations and GTM.

A research agenda that includes a retrospective analysis of biographies, especially considering contextual factors such as culture and role stereotypes, is proposed as a starting point for research in this field.

The design and implementation of current GTM must be questioned to fit the contextual factors and to currently match the needs of talented male and female employees throughout their lifelong career course. Tailor-made GTM measures depending on the career phase are proposed.

The paper provides a novel synthesis of the existing research and literature on GTM, gender and careers. By showing the complexity of individual career decisions that are influenced by internal and contextual factors, the paper emphasizes the importance of flexible, locally responsive and gender-inclusive GTM. The paper is useful for academics who seek insight into a talent’s decision-making process and practitioners who manage talent globally.

Due to the changes in the market, the shift to proactive and self-developed career management is evident. It results in the emergence of contemporary career attitudes, namely, protean and boundaryless ones. Individuals with protean career (PC) and boundaryless career (BC) attitudes may be more inclined to switch jobs, which affect decreased organizational commitment. The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether PC and BC attitudes affect organizational commitment of young adults in finance sector.

The data of 177 young Lithuanian adults from finance sector were collected in quantitative research.

The research results indicate that young adults in finance sector have contemporary career attitudes significantly expressed. The regression analysis findings show that affective commitment is positively predicted by self-directed career management and boundaryless mindset, and negatively predicted by values-driven career orientation and organizational mobility preference. Continuance commitment is negatively predicted by self-directed career management and organizational mobility preference.

This research is valuable as few if any studies cover contemporary career attitudes and organizational commitment of already working young adults in finance sector in a European country, namely, Lithuania.

The protean and boundaryless career concepts have dominated recent career research. Demographic groups are posited to differ on these “new career orientations,” with implications for career development and social equity. The purpose of this paper is to test these hypotheses by systematically reviewing research on demographic differences in new career orientations.

This paper meta-analyzes demographic differences in protean, boundaryless, and proactive career orientations using data from 29,605 individuals (74 samples).

Demographic differences in new career orientations are generally negligible to small, with organizational mobility preferences showing the largest differences across demographic characteristics. Age showed curvilinear relations with new career orientations. National economic development moderated new career orientation-educational level relations.

Results support the construct validity of “proactive career orientation” as a unifying construct encompassing protean and psychological mobility boundaryless orientations (cf. Wiernik and Kostal, 2017). Future research should continue to explore career development in diverse economic/cultural contexts.

Small demographic differences suggest that potential benefits of new career orientations are not limited to members of particular groups. Age and education relations were large enough to indicate that large population segments may benefit from additional interventions to support career mobility and development.

This paper uses meta-analytic techniques to investigate demographic differences in career orientations with larger samples than possible in a single primary study. The meta-analytic design permitted investigation of a variety of methodological and cultural/economic moderators not previously considered in career orientation research.