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The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical framework for measuring public sector managers' career success.

The theoretical foundation used in this study is social cognitive career theory. To conduct a literature search, several keywords were identified, i.e. career success, objective and subjective career success, managers, managerial career development and social cognitive career theory. Several electronic databases available in the university's library, such as Emerald, EBSCOHost, SAGE, Science Direct and Blackwell Synergy, were used to search for resources. Literature includes sources written in both English and Malay.

The four factors that have predictive potential on managers' career success are individual‐related factors, organizational‐related factors, managerial competencies‐related factors, and the person‐environment fit factor. Career success should be operationalized using both objective and subjective career success.

The study was exploratory, based on a literature review. Empirical study is needed to examine the predictive potential of the four key factors (i.e. individual‐related factors, organizational‐related factors, managerial competencies‐related factors, and person‐environment fit factor) for public sector managers' career success.

Strengthening the HRD framework through organizational development, personnel training and development and career development may develop and unleash individual potential which leads to positive career outcomes (objective and subjective career success).

The research constructs a theoretical framework which outlines the predictive potential of four key factors on public sector managers' career success. The four key factors can be developed through HRD practices.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential effects of empowering leadership on followers’ subjective career success through psychological empowerment, protean career orientation, and career commitment.

Full-time employees working in the USA were recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Participants answered surveys at three separate points over a six-week period (n=261). Structural equation modeling and bootstrapping were used to verify the indirect effect of empowering leadership on career satisfaction controlling for common method variance and growth need strength.

Empowering leadership was positively related to followers’ subsequent psychological empowerment, which in turn predicted protean career attitudes and career commitment, but only career commitment had a significant relationship with career satisfaction.

Empowering leadership behaviors focus on potentially career-enhancing factors, including providing followers with the confidence, inspiration, and authority to assume control of their work lives. Empowering leaders benefit their followers’ careers, and psychological empowerment and career commitment may be important mechanisms in the empowering leadership-career success relationship when their effects are considered simultaneously. Employees’ development of a protean career orientation has less direct effect on subjective career success than simple commitment to a career.

Empowering leadership has been overlooked in career literature. The findings advance the understanding of how empowering leader behaviors could help employees’ subjective career success in a serial mediation model. Additionally, the study empirically demonstrates that psychologically empowered employees are more likely to engage in protean career actions and navigate their own career goals.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of servant leadership on followers’ subjective career success and the mediating role of career skills. The moderating effect of followers’ proactive personality is also investigated.

This paper collected two-wave matched data from 283 employees of an IT company. The authors use hierarchical regression and bootstrapping to test the hypotheses.

Servant leadership has a positive effect on career satisfaction and perceived employability through career skills. In addition, proactive personality moderates the association between servant leadership and career skills, such that the relationship is stronger when proactive personality is high. Proactive personality also moderates the indirect effect of servant leadership on career satisfaction and perceived employability.

The findings suggest that organizations should select and train leaders to practice servant leadership to enhance employee subjective career success.

This is the first study to investigate the mechanism and boundary conditions of the association between servant leadership and employee subjective career success.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an integrative process model that explains the mechanisms through which intrinsic motivation can influence career self‐management and subsequent subjective and objective career success.

Research on career self‐management can benefit by incorporating an intrinsic motivation perspective. The paper proposes a model that depicts how four components of intrinsic motivation – meaningfulness, competence, choice, and progress – can contribute to career self‐management.

Because the manuscript is conceptual and theoretical in nature, there are no empirical findings to discuss. The paper does, however, advance six testable research propositions linking components of intrinsic motivation to career self‐management and career success.

The model is most applicable for individuals who have some level of control over their own career choices and mobility. Also, we focus on intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, motivation, and we consider psychological and sense‐making aspects of motivation rather than structural and task‐based aspects. Propositions are advanced to be tested in future research; future research can use the model as a platform from which to study the connection between intrinsic motivation and career self‐management.

The paper describes how the model can be applied to help individuals navigate the realities and challenges of their careers.

Prior research has not specified the exact mechanisms through which intrinsic motivation may guide career self‐management. This paper provides an integrated process model addressing this need with relevance to researchers, career management professionals, and individuals.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of gender upon the relation between protean and boundaryless career attitudes and subjective career success, in today's dynamic and changing organizational context.

Data were collected using a questionnaire conducted on 150 graduate and post‐graduate distance learning students. The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The analysis indicates that women's career success is positively related with self‐direction and negatively related with their reliance on their own values. Furthermore, the authors found a negative relation between organizational mobility preference and men's subjective career success.

A potential limitation of this study is that all participants were distance‐learning students, thus limiting the generalizability of the findings to other populations. Furthermore, cross‐sectional designs do not permit drawing conclusions regarding the causal direction.

Organizations should transform work structures and human resources policies and provide career models that allow women flexibility and more control over their work. Research results show that values‐driven predisposition may lead to low levels of perceived career success. This indirectly suggests that individuals experience intrinsic career success when their values are consistent with organizational values, and therefore they should seek work opportunities in organizations whose aim, scope, and philosophy is consistent with their ideals.

This is the first paper to shed light on gender's impact upon the relationship between protean and boundaryless career attitudes and subjective career success, in a context in which there have been calls in literature for more career research taking into account gender differences.

The purpose of this study is to test the moderating role of career-enhancing strategies (CESs) in the relationship between career commitment (CC) and subjective career success (CS).

Data were collected from 217 full-time employees working for three different sectors in Ankara, Turkey. The participants were asked to respond to a self-reported survey. The hypotheses were tested using a hierarchical regression analysis.

The results indicated that CC had a significant and positive effect on subjective CS. Furthermore, the positive relationship between CC and subjective CS was stronger for employees with a high level of self-nomination and for employees with a high level of networking. However, creating career opportunities did not moderate the effects of CC on subjective CS.

Because this study had a cross-sectional research design, causality cannot be established among the study variables.

The findings suggest a better understanding of the way CC is able to affect subjective CS through the networking and self-nomination CESs.

This study is original, in that no previous studies have investigated the moderating role of CESs in the relationship between CC and subjective CS.

As the notions of protean career and job crafting share a common emphasis on self-management, proactivity and customization, this study aimed to examine if the associations between protean career, subjective and objective career success were mediated by job crafting, assessed via its three main dimensions (i.e. increasing structural job resources, increasing social job resources and increasing challenging job demands).

The authors sampled 594 Italian employees using a time-lagged research design: protean career was assessed at T1 and job crafting and career success at T2. Responses were analyzed through structural equation modeling.

This study’s results showed that increasing structural job resources mediated the association of protean career with subjective career success, while increasing challenging job demands mediated its association with objective career success.

In contrast to previous studies, in this contribution, the mediating role of job crafting is disentangled by taking into account its three respective dimensions. Additionally, the authors included both forms of career success as outcomes of protean career. Implications for future research and practical recommendations are presented and discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to explore objective and subjective career success and to identify factors contributing to career success among a sample of technical and vocational education and training (TVET) “late bloomers” working in Malaysia.

Incorporating a mixed method design, the authors quantitatively surveyed 86 TVET graduates from two multinational companies, followed by in‐depth qualitative interviews with five high‐performing “late bloomer” TVET graduates.

Quantitative results indicate that the respondents progressed in their careers both in terms of salary and promotions, while most were satisfied with their careers and felt that they were internally and externally marketable. Qualitative findings indicate that the success of the late bloomers was the result of a perceived good fit between an individual's strengths and the organization's ability to compensate, motivate and support the individuals in their career progression.

The limited sample size employed can only provide initial insights into career success levels and contributing factors of career success. The results may spur larger scale research on career success of TVET graduates in Malaysia and the neighbouring region.

The paper provides important initial findings on the technical and vocational career line as an alternative pathway for Malaysian youth, particularly school leavers and underachievers, to achieve career success and enhanced social inclusion through higher salaries, job status and educational attainment.

The paper highlights the unexplored potential of career success as a facilitator of educational attainment and social inclusion, rather than the traditional path of educational attainment first, followed by career success.

The paper seeks to analyze empirically the consequences of family responsibilities for career success and the influence of career context variables and gender on this relationship.

The sample consists of 305 business school graduates (52 percent male) from a major Central European university who finished their studies around 2000 and who were in their early career stages (i.e. third and fourth career years).

The paper reports a negative relationship between family responsibilities and objective and subjective career success via work centrality. There is also substantive support for the effect of contextual factors on the relationship between family situations and career success, emphasizing the importance of a multi‐level perspective. Finally, evidence of gender effects exists.

The empirical generalizability of the results is limited by the structure of the sample. Qualitative in‐depth studies are needed to further understand the relationships found.

The results underscore the importance of the work‐family‐interface for employee retention measures. Tailored HR policies are crucial.

Theoretically, the paper develops a multi‐level causal model of specific aspects of work‐family relations including variables ranging from meso (career context) to more micro (family, individual). Empirically, the study focuses on young business professionals prior to having a family or in the early stages of their family life.

The purpose of this research is to investigate how bridging and bonding social capital relate to career success among career women in a patriarchal African society. Further, the intervening role of self-esteem in the association between social capital and career success was examined.

Structured questionnaire was used to collect data from 488 Nigerian career women in management cadres in both private and public sectors. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was applied in testing the proposed hypotheses.

The outcomes show that bridging social capital has a significant positive relationship with subjective and objective career success. Conversely, bonding social capital has no significant positive relationship with subjective and objective career success. Further analyses show that self-esteem only partially mediates the association between bridging social capital and career success while an insignificant intervening effect of self-esteem on the association between bonding social capital and career success was found.

The findings suggest the need for organisations to stimulate a friendly work environment that has a zero-tolerance culture for workplace discrimination against women. This will enable the women to relate with people in the workplace irrespective of gender or cadre to generate more bridging social capital to achieve greater career success.

The study extends social capital and career success research to career women in a patriarchal African context as a response to the call for context-specific career research in non-western countries particularly Africa. Second, the study provides empirical evidence that African career woman with bridging social capital can achieve career success irrespective of their self-esteem level amid patriarchal discrimination.