Career effectiveness and its determinants

Abstract

Study of careers has become an important aspect in the fast changing organizational context. It has come to be increasingly recognized at present, that career management is the responsibility of both the individual as well as the organization. This empirical study tries to understand the important elements of individual and organizational career practices that affect an employee’s career effectiveness. Most of the previous studies have used the objective terms of career success such as remuneration and position as the criterion variable. But since career outcome expectations vary across individuals and also since the concept of career itself has evolved over time, it was decided to use a more comprehensive concept of career outcome namely career effectiveness as the outcome variable. Career effectiveness as defined by Hall (2002) has both long-term orientation such as identity and adaptability as well as short-term orientation such as career attitudes and performance. Further both behavioral aspects such as performance and adaptability and individual subjective aspects such as identity and attitudes make it a more comprehensive way of assessing career outcome. The results of this research study indicate that individual determinants such as career planning and knowledge of organizational politics and organizational level determinants such as training and development support, quality of performance feedback and supervisory support explain significant variances in the determination of employee career effectiveness.