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Antecedents of Career Goals and Their Implications for Career Success Across Contexts

出版	Universitat de Barcelona, 2018
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=QPOawwEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋In this dissertation, I contribute to the literature that addresses why some people are more successful in their careers than others. Within this stream of research, scholars have increasingly examined the predictors of career success (Ng, Eby, Sorensen, & Feldman, 2005). Despite their relevance in career theorizing, little is known, however, about how career goals affect individuals' objective and subjective career success. Whereas objective career success refers to tangible indicators of career success such as status and salary, subjective career success makes reference to affective and attitudinal criteria like job and career satisfaction or turnover intentions (e.g., Allen, Eby, Poteet, Lentz, & Lima, 2004). In this thesis, I examine how and when career goals relate to career success. Overall, I aimed to answer in this dissertation 1) whether career goals predict career success, 2) when they matter most for understanding career success, and 3) whether they mediate the relationship between personality traits and career success. These three research objectives are addressed in three related empirical studies. In the first study, I draw on goal-setting theory (Locke & Latham, 1990a) to examine whether individuals with difficult and specific long-term career goals (i.e., career visions) are more likely to be satisfied with their jobs seven years later. For this purpose, I analyzed data of a time-lagged study with 74 MBA alumni. Confirming hypothesis of goal-setting theory, people with specific and difficult long-term career goals were more satisfied with their jobs seven years later, which explained why they reported fewer intentions to leave their jobs. In the second study, I aimed to advance these findings by testing whether people with abstract ambition goals (i.e., self-enhancement values, Schwartz values theory, 1992) are also more likely to attain objective career success. Results from a cross- cultural study sampling approximately 35,000 participants across 29 countries show that ambition goals are positively associated with hierarchical status. In line with the tenet of the trait-activation theory (Tett & Burnett, 2003; Tett & Guterman, 2000) that "strong situations" limit the influence of individual differences, the study's finding indicate that the relationship between ambition goals and hierarchical status is most pronounced in "weak" situations, specifically in countries that do not highly encourage and reward ambition related behavior. On the contrary in countries with "strong" ambition cues, individuals' ambition goals no longer explain who makes it to the top. In the third study, I continued examining the boundary conditions of the relationship between career goals and career success. Specifically, I examined how the occupational context alters the relevance of short-term career goals for explaining career satisfaction. Based on self-verification theory (Swann, 1983), I hypothesized that positive goal emotions mediate the relationship between the personality trait of core self-evaluations (Judge, Locke, & Durham, 1997) and career satisfaction. Relying on the situational strength framework (Meyer, Dalal, & Hermida, 2010; Mischel, 1973), I expected that the relationship between positive goal emotions and career satisfaction is most pronounced when individuals are not highly embedded in their occupations. Results of a time-lagged study over 10 months with three measurement waves including responses from 140 MBA alumni support the hypothesized moderated mediation model. Core self-evaluations are both directly and indirectly related to career satisfaction through positive goal emotions. This indirect effect is moderated by occupational embeddedness such that a high level of occupational embeddedness substitutes positive goal emotions. Taken together, these three empirical studies discuss the antecedents, boundary conditions, and implications of career goals for individuals' career success, providing important contributions to the careers and personal goals literatures. Specifically, the findings presented in this dissertation suggest that people who pursue ambitious, challenging, specific, and emotionally positive career goals are more likely to be successful in their careers. The results furthermore indicate that the appraisals of career goals can partly channel the effects of personality traits on career success. Although all three studies point to the benefits of pursuing career goals, the results of this dissertation also suggest that career goals are not equally relevant across contexts for understanding career success. In this sense, certain cultural and occupational contexts can alter the importance of career goal contents and appraisals, leaving career goals either important or negligible for predicting career success.