A Study On Manager's Career Resilience: Construct And Relationship With Its Antecedents And Outcomes

Since the 1980s, with the emerging new career paradigm of "protean career", people have viewed great changes in the workplace, examples frequently cited including no job security and no promise of lifetime employment, more inter-organisational movements beyond single employers, limited linear progression and more cyclical and lateral movement, increasingly discontinuous and unstable work lives. In response to the revolution in the world of work, many scholars and practitioners advocate individuals to build career resilience to achieve success in the turbulent and uncertain workplace. Since being as the key resource of organization, managers should be career resilient. In addition, in accord with positive psychology, career resilience studies take a positive perspective instead of the traditional negative approach. So this study attempts to investigate empirically managers'career resilience.This study first reviewed the literature in depth of the definitions, measurements, theoretical models and empirical research in regard to career resilience. Although career resilience is very important for human resource development, it was surpring to find that comparatively few prior studies investigated career resilience as an independent construct instead of a component of career motivation, and the antecedent and outcome variables had not been explored fully, the measurement was not satisfying too. At the same time, because of the different culture background, the construction and the antecedent and outcome variables of career resilience in Chinese culture background may be not identical to that of the western countries. Therefore, referencing on the previous research methods, exploring empirically on the Chinese manager's career resilience may contribute to future research.In the pilot study, the construct of career resilience was explored in the Chinese culture context and a measurement tool was developed for it. In the main study, the relationship of career resilience with its antecedents and outcome variables were examined. Specifically,1) the distribution of career resilience on the demographic variables was examined; 2) the effect of individual variables such as psychological capital on career resilience was examined; 3) the effect of organizational variables such as supervisor support, colleague support, organizational career management, organizational culture on career resilience was examined; 4) the aftereffect of career resilience on consequent variables such as personal performance, career satisfaction was examined.Finally, based on these results, some recommendations were offered for managers and organizations on how to build and enhance career resilience.The participants of the main study are managers from the electronic related corporations under the Zhonghuan Information Group in Tianjin city. By convenient sampling, a total valid 324 completed surveys were returned. Based on the data analysis method such as correlation, multiple regressions, analysis of variance (ANOVA),the main findings are gotten as following:1) Exploring factor analysis showed that the construct of career resilience consisted of six factors, i.e., the first factor related to career initiative; the second factor related to career vista; the third factor related to active learning; the four factor related to achievement motivation; the fifth factor related to mental resilience; the sixth factor related to flexibility.2) The developed career resilience measurement which was consisted of 21 items had good internal-consistency reliability and construct validity. The Cronbachαreliability coefficient of the total scale was.922.3) The demographic variables, i.e., gender, age, education, rank, managerial field, number of years of being manager, number of years of paid work, career/ organization change, had no statistically main effects on career resilience, and had no significant interaction effect on career resilience with gender.4) The organizational variables of culture types, number of employees, capital origin had no statistically effects on career resilience; other variables of organizational culture dimensions, supervisor support, colleague support, organizational career management yielded significant effects on career resilience.5) Individual variables of psychological capital, Guanxi and couple support had significant effects on career resilience, but psychical health status yields no significant effect on career resilience. 6) Career resilience significantly predicted the outcome variable of personal performance and career satisfaction, but had no prediction on the mental health and turnover intention.Based on the theoretical and empirical research, the strategies to enhance career resilience were discussed from the perspective of individual and organization in the end of this paper. For the individuals, career resilience might enhanced by developing protective factors like social capital, human capital, and psychological capital on the one hand, and reducing risk factors on the other hand. For the organizations, their employee's career resilience maybe enhanced by building strong corporate culture, stressing the organizational training and development, offering EAP programs, doing a good job in layoff and rotation.At last, this study summarized the major findings and discussed the limitations of this study, and also recommendations for future research were provided.