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This article aims to examine the role of boundaryless career orientation in influencing Internet professionals' strategies toward workplace problems in China's Internet companies, which feature prominent problems including excessive overwork. It addresses one question: how do Chinese Internet professionals make grievance strategies?

This article draws on qualitative data based on semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 134 employees from 6 representative Chinese Internet companies. The data were collected during 2018-2021 and analyzed with a grounded theory approach.

This article highlights the role of boundaryless career orientation in explaining Chinese Internet professionals' strategies toward workplace grievances. The author develops a comprehensive model to illustrate how boundaryless career orientation influences four grievance strategies namely, strategic compliance, exit, dissent expression and resistance that correspond to four different motives to advance the professionals' boundaryless career: learning, transferring, relieving and resolving. Internet professionals choose different grievance strategies based on how each option can benefit their boundaryless career goals.

This article is one of the first to bring in boundaryless career orientation as a key factor in explaining Chinese Internet professionals' grievance strategies. It provides a fuller picture than previous studies by showing wide varieties of professionals' grievance behaviors. The finding of high-level boundaryless career orientation among Internet professionals offers insights on how companies can improve employment relations by improving career management practices.

This study aims at analyzing the impact of perceptions of the fourth industrial revolution (crisis and opportunity) in the relationship between workers’ career attitudes and future learning intentions.

This study analyzed the multiple mediating effect of the perception of the fourth industrial revolution in the relationship between career attitudes and future learning intention using data of 305 Korean workers. As career attitude variables, boundaryless and protean career orientation variables were used, and perception of the fourth industrial revolution was analyzed (opportunity and crisis perception).

Both workers’ boundaryless career orientation and protean career orientation influenced future learning intention through the perception of opportunity for the fourth industrial revolution. This result suggested that flexible career attitudes positively recognized the changes of the fourth industrial revolution and had an effect on promoting attitude toward future learning.

The study confirmed that workers’ flexible career attitudes could promote perception of opportunity rather than crisis in changing situation and strengthen their intention to prepare for the future by mediating this perception. These results suggest that lifelong learning and competency development can be reinforced by facilitating perception of an opportunities for external change for individual career development.

Insights for personal career development were provided by analyzing the relationship between flexible career attitudes, which are increasing in importance in the modern society, and perceptions of changes in external environment.

The study aims to explore the role of mentoring and the moderating effects of gender on protean and boundaryless career orientations in the African albeit Nigerian cultural context.

Data were collected from 250 Nigerian nurses through a questionnaire.

Mentoring support predicted protean career dimensions but was non-significant for boundaryless career dimensions. Gender directly accounted for a significant percentage of the variance in physical mobility in favor of women but did not predict self-directed, value-driven and psychological mobility career attitudes. Gender significantly moderated the relationship between mentoring and new career dimensions except physical mobility.

The male sample was limited and data from a single professional group/organization in Nigeria may not typify organizations in general. This calls for caution in generalizing findings.

Proactive career management and value-driven attitudes can be fostered by ensuring quality mentor support. The peculiar direct and moderating effects of gender on protean and boundaryless careers deserve particular attention.

The absence of African perspectives on new career directions in most reference journals limits the global scope of comparative studies. The present study provides information on the under-researched role of mentoring and gender in modern career models from Africa, and makes useful theoretical contributions to new career perspectives, especially in the context of how relationships among study variables may differ across national cultural contexts.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relation among work values and protean and boundaryless career orientations.

A sample of 238 employees aged 16 to 65 years from the French-speaking region of Switzerland completed two different work values scales as well as protean and boundaryless career attitudes scales. To assess the relationships among these constructs, correlations, multiple regression, and exploratory factorial analysis techniques were used.

Results suggested that protean and boundaryless career orientations were significantly positively related to intrinsic, social, and status work values. A boundaryless-organizational mobility orientation was significantly negatively associated with extrinsic/material work values.

Results have important implications for understanding which work values are typically endorsed by people with a protean or a boundaryless career orientation.

The present study contributes to the understanding of protean and boundaryless careers by clarifying the relationships among these career orientations and work values.

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 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 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.

Contemporary careers research suggests that individuals are more likely to be proactive about their careers when they possess an internal, rather than an external locus of control (LOC). The purpose of this paper is to adopt the view that individuals can be both external and proactive depending on whether or not they possess an incremental implicit theory.

Self-administered surveys were completed by 127 employed individuals in Nigeria. These surveys were used to gather information on individuals’ external LOC, protean and boundaryless career orientations and implicit theory beliefs.

Results indicated partial support for positive relationships between external LOC and contemporary career orientations and that an incremental implicit theory can have a positive moderating effect on the relationship between an external LOC belief in chance and the values-driven protean career orientation.

The study was based on a cross-sectional study in one time period and all information was self-report.

The results suggest that HR managers that operate in global environments should consider the importance of individual implicit theory and on career orientations and take a broader view of the role of internal and external LOC.

The study questions whether predominant perspectives of the relationship between proactive career orientations and internal LOC applies to contexts where external LOC predominate.

This study is unique in the examination of positive relationships between implicit theory, external LOC and contemporary career orientations. Furthermore, the study examines these relationships in an unstable and unpredictable work environment context, Nigeria, where such positive relationships are highly necessary to improve the career self-management of individuals.