Research On The Mechanism Between Employability And Career Success Of Knowledge Workers

In the 21st century, with the rapid development of economy, Chinese enterprises have to face such a realistic condition:the uncertainty in competition, the instability of organization and the insecurity of employment. However, Western companies have experienced these in the middle and late of 20th century. At that time, some western scholars found that the traditional career of employees turned into protean and boundaryless careers, which caused many changes in employment relationship, employment concepts, career planning, career goals, career success criteria and organization career management et al. The transition from "relational contact "to "transactional contact" had a lasting effect on career development of the employees and career management of the organizations. The traditional lifelong employment concept was gradually replaced with the concept of improving lifelong employability; employees began to redesign their careers and assumed primary responsibilities. Meanwhile, organizations also started to adjust career management strategies, and bore some of the blame for career development and career success of the employees. In such a complex environment, employees had to enhance the employability in order that they can adapt to reality and further reach self-realization, because of high flow ratio of the employees and the great responsibility of the organizations for raising human capital worth.Based on these, firstly, the study applied to the tools measuring protean and boundaryless career attitudes, used knowledge workers of the enterprise as a study case, and explored the characteristics of protean and boundaryless careers of knowledge workers in Chinese culture and environment. The result indicated that Chinese enterprise knowledge workers possessed protean and boundaryless career attitudes, and differences in age, education, position and unit property caused that there were significant differences in protean and boundaryless attitude of different groups. Protean and boundaryless careers presented the characteristics of reactivity, variability, non-boundary, diversity and complexity.Secondly, the study explored the correlation between employability and career success under the condition of protean and boundaryless careers. Given the lack of human capital scale in existing employability scales, this article used documentation, expert interview and factor analysis to develop a 12-item human capital scale of high reliability and validity, which included four dimensions:education, work experience, learning, and training, and revised the other dimensions of employability and all the dimensions of career success. On this basis, this article explored the correlation between employability and career success.406 valid samples were conducted exploratory factor analysis, correlation analysis and regression analysis. The results indicated that there was a positive correlation between employability and career success of knowledge workers, and employability can positively predict career success.Thirdly, the inner mechanism between employability and career success was further explored. The study used SPSS 17.0 and LISREL 8.7 to conduct descriptive statistics analysis, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, correlation analysis, mediatorial effect analysis and structural equation model analysis, and revised the two scales of self-esteem and career commitment. The results displayed that affective commitment was a mediator between employability and career success. However, normative commitment and continuance commitment didn't play a mediator. Self-esteem was a mediator between employability and affective commitment. Employability influenced affective commitment through self-esteem, and further influenced career success through affective commitment. Self-esteem and affective commitment as mediators had an indirect effect between employability and career success.