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The purpose of this paper is to examine the moderating role of pay in the relationship between employee ambition and taking charge behavior, and its subsequent effects on employee career satisfaction.

A two-wave quantitative investigation was conducted among alumni of a large public university in the Netherlands.

The results show that taking charge behavior mediates the positive relationship between employee ambition and career satisfaction. They also show that pay positively moderates this mediation, such that the relationship between employee ambition and taking charge behavior is stronger when ambitious employees receive an increase in pay, leading to increased career satisfaction. Conversely, a decrease in pay does not moderate ambitious employees’ taking charge behavior and the impact on their career satisfaction.

The study draws on self-report data collected in one country: the Netherlands.

The study highlights the importance of pay for higher job involvement, demonstrating its impact on taking charge behavior among employees with higher levels of ambition.

This is the first empirical study to examine the impact of pay on employees’ taking charge behavior and the subsequent implications for career satisfaction.

The purpose of this paper is to challenge existing models of career ambition, extending understanding of how women define and experience ambition at early career stages in a professional services organisation.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 women from a professional services organisation, who were aged 24-33 and had not yet reached managerial positions. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and template analysis was conducted.

The analysis revealed four main themes in the women’s experiences: subjective, dynamic ambition; frustrated lack of sight; self-efficacy enables ambition; and a need for resilience vs a need to adapt. The findings support that women do identify as ambitious, but they vary in the extent to which they view ambition as intrinsic and stable, or affected by external, contextual factors, such as identity-fit, barriers, support and work-life conflict.

These results demonstrated insufficiency of current models of ambition and a new model was proposed. The model explains how women’s workplace experiences affect their ambition and therefore how organisations and individuals can better support women to maintain and fulfil their ambitions.

This study extends and contributes to the redefinition of women’s career ambition, proposing a model incorporating women’s affective responses to both internal (psychological) and external (organisational) factors. It provides further evidence against previous individual-level claims that women “opt-out” of their careers due to an inherent lack of ambition, focussing on the interplay of contextual-level explanations.

This study sets out to examine how gender and ambition are related to work hours and the utilization of other flexible work‐home arrangements, and how this use is – in turn – associated with career‐related outcomes (i.e. job level, and career satisfaction).

In total, 212 Dutch working parents from different organizations participated in a questionnaire survey. Underpinned by an inter‐disciplinary theoretical framework, hypotheses were developed on the associations of gender, ambition, work‐home arrangements and career‐related outcomes.

It was found that ambitious parents made more use of flexible work‐home arrangements and worked more hours per week than less ambitious parents. This relationship was especially strong for mothers. Furthermore, parents' work hours and utilization of flexible arrangements were positively related to their job level and career satisfaction. Finally, the association of ambition with career‐related outcomes was mediated by work hours.

Employers should support their working parents in using flexible work‐home arrangements, thereby simultaneously assisting them in balancing work with care‐giving responsibilities, preventing them from losing their ambition, and promoting their career success.

The study made a pioneering effort to conceptualise and operationalise career‐related ambition. By showing that utilization of flexible work‐home arrangements is positively related to career success, the study also adds to the business case for these arrangements. Moreover, the study challenges the popular assumption that Dutch women's ambition vanishes into thin air once they become mothers.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between career ambition – defined as high achievement motivation and strong career orientation – and both extrinsic (salary, position) and intrinsic success (job satisfaction, goal attainment) of psychologists. Over and above this, the authors explore whether extrinsic success predicts intrinsic success or vice versa.

In order to analyze the impact of career ambition on extrinsic and intrinsic success, the authors conducted two online studies with psychology graduates – a cross-sectional study (Study 1; n=119) and a longitudinal one (Study 2; n=63; two-three years interval between assessment points). The authors applied regression and cross-lagged analyses to investigate the interplay of career ambition and career success.

The results show that career ambition impacts on both extrinsic and intrinsic success. More specifically, extrinsic success was positively predicted by career orientation in Study 1. In contrast, achievement motivation was negatively related to intrinsic success (Study 1) and even diminished it over time (Study 2). Findings of the cross-lagged analysis further underlined that intrinsic success predicts extrinsic success.

The study contributes by separately investigating two aspects of career ambition and showing their different effects on career success in the specific profession of psychologists. As cross-lagged findings revealed that psychologists’ intrinsic success predicted their extrinsic success and not vice versa, the authors discuss whether psychologists might be worsening their career development in the long run by showing high achievement motivation.

Although the sense of entitlement was traditionally associated with a range of maladaptive personality characteristics, the purpose of the current study is to take an initial step to explore a positive implication of psychological entitlement.

The target population for this study comprises employees from various industries in Taiwan. To examine the research hypotheses, structural equation modeling techniques were employed to perform a mediation analysis and conditional process analysis.

The results of this research showed that career ambition mediates the relationship between psychological entitlement and job involvement, where psychological entitlement is positively related to career ambition, and career ambition is positively related to job involvement. Nonetheless, the authors' data did not support the proposed moderation effect of self-efficacy on the relationship between career ambition and job involvement.

This work is among the first to investigate how an employee's psychological entitlement is associated with his/her job involvement and the boundary conditions that affect this relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the behavioural consequences of public service motivation (PSM) and how motivation relates to an individual’s call to serve both inside and outside of the workplace. More specifically, this study examines whether and how PSM relates to prosocial behaviours – volunteering and giving – and career ambitions to work in the government or non-profit sector among public affair graduate students.

Logistic regression is used to examine the PSM link using a composite of the 40-item scale, each of the six dimensions – commitment to the public interest, civic duty, social justice, attraction to policymaking, compassion, and self-sacrifice – and the five-item scale from the Merit Principles Survey. The analyses draw upon data from a unique online survey of 122 graduate students in Master of Public Administration and Master of Public Policy programmes.

The results indicate that people with higher levels of PSM are more likely to want to work in public service and volunteer. However, mixed results were found for the relationship between PSM and giving charitable donations and career ambitions to work in government and no link was found for career ambitions to work in the non-profit sector.

This paper answers calls to examine the dimensions of PSM and examines Perry’s (1996) original conception. The results provide practical implications for human resource managers as well as non-profit and public managers in recruiting and retaining employees and volunteers.

This paper aims to explore and better understand the workplace experiences of young professional women, as they relate to their leadership ambition. Research has shown that women graduate from college with equal or greater leadership ambition than men. By mid-career, however, a significant gender ambition gap emerges, which may be a contributing factor to the gender leadership gaps that persist across all sectors of the economy.

In-depth interviews were conducted with young American professional women who excelled and had leadership ambition in college. The theoretical framework is the expectancy–value–cost model of motivation.

Analysis reveals a consistent decline in the young women’s leadership ambition after entering their professional career, stemming from a general sense of dissatisfaction with their jobs, a lack of connection with their organizations’ leadership and culture and an expectation that moving up the ladder would result in a less satisfying personal life.

Although this study is not statistically generalizable to a broader population, the findings are relevant for colleges and universities that prepare women for their careers, and organizations that seek to recruit and retain female talent.

By focusing on the experiences of young professional women, this paper contributes to the exploration of gender leadership gaps as well as to the discussion of policies and programs that may contribute to keeping more women in the leadership trajectory.

Still, (1986) has claimed that representation of women in management is low and has changed little since the late 60s. There may be structural reasons for this, in particular concentration of women in a relatively restricted spread of occupations and industries. Perceived lack of long term career commitment by women has also been put forward as a factor (Still, 1986; Rosenfeld, 1979). Interaction will exist between women's human capital investments and career commitment. It is also claimed that women may have lower motivation to succeed and that this could account for their low participation rates in upper management (Albrech, 1978; O'Leary, 1974).

Why do women’s ambitions wane? After an historic 50-year climb to unprecedented educational and career heights, many best-selling books, viral articles, and research studies are telling us that the aspirations and confidence of today’s women often abate. These readings offer explanations such as workplace biases and family responsibilities for the ebb of ambition; yet, all fail to identify the underlying unifying problem that explains choices women make to step off the upward fast tracks in favor of different work and life paths. The problem is that the workplace is not a reliable site of recognition for women. Without the positive feedback of appropriate recognition from an appreciative community, women’s ambitions and the intensity with which they are pursued tilt elsewhere. Women’s movement into and embrace of entrepreneurship provide a clear illustration of one way women are designing the workplace to support the maintenance of their ambitions.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how formal mentoring programmes may enhance female mentees' career development, particularly in a case study of a major high street bank.

Empirical case study work, from mentees' and mentors' points of view, on the evaluation of a pilot formal mentoring programme for the career development of females is discussed. The two stage evaluation encompasses gender issues such as the impact of gender imbalance and the nature of ambition, together with mentoring issues such as expectations and development of the programme.

Overall, it is found that the mentoring programme is considered, in different ways to mentees and mentors, to be highly successful. Further, it can offer benefits to mentors too. Although females' self‐perceptions, gendered values and perceptions of management and leadership can often impede the career development of females, effective, formal mentoring can be seen to offset such impediments.

The main inference is that effective formal mentoring can actively bolster females' management career development. The case evaluation exposes a series of good practice points in formal mentoring programmes. Capitalising on these points, organisations can enable females' development in management roles.

The paper acts to support greater gender equity in females' career development in management in the UK finance sector, conceptually and practically.