The Research Of Knowledge Workers' Career Stagnation And Governance Countermeasure

Knowledge workers are occupying the primary portion of workforces in knowledge economy era, and the knowledge workers'continuous growth has also become one influential factor of organizational sustainable development. However, career stagnation seem to be popular more and more due to less hierarchies of organizations, quick depreciation of the knowledge and fast changes of external environments, preventing knowledge workers from growing persistently. Therefore, how to aid employee to overcome stagnation is a serious issue in the view of the organizations. This study selected knowledge workers as the object and attempted to measure their career stagnation and seek for management strategies to break through the stagnations, aiming at establishment of a new set of approaches to manage employee effectively in the new environments and conditions. This dissertation consists of eight chapters and could be summarized into five parts: brief (chapter 1), literature review (chapter 2), empirical study (including chapter 3, 4, 5, 6), countermeasure (chapter 7), summary and further study (chapter 8). In chapter 1, it outlined research background, significance, scope, method, framework and innovation points. Meanwhile, it defined and elaborated several basic concepts such as knowledge worker, career growth and career stagnation. The purpose of the chapter 1 is to direct and arrange the whole dissertation in general. In chapter 2, it reviewed and summarized literatures relating to career stagnation in aspects of three major research fields, measurement and governance. It refined three dimensions, namely, motivation, capacity and opportunity, from the three major research fields; the literature of occupational stagnation measurement laid theoretical foundation for development of the scale; the literature of career stagnation governance suggested that perceived organizational support would be an explorative perspective for further study. In chapter 3, it introduced the general design and construct and arranged three branches of the empirical study. The first branch study was in chapter 4, the second was in chapter 5, and the third was in chapter 6. In chapter 4, it was to develop and test career stagnation scale. Since current scales are designed for occupational tableland, career barriers and career growth separately, and could not reflect the whole contend of career stagnation completely, this study integrated the relevant researches to develop a 360 degree scale in dimensions of motivation, capability and opportunity. Since this scale was developed newly, it needed strict testing with statistical software, of SPSS and Lisrel. The reliability test includes Cronbach's αtest and homogeneity test; validity test includes content validity, structure validity and criteria validity. Structure validity was tested by factor analysis and SEM technology. The test results indicated that both reliability and validity of the scale were fair ideal. In chapter 5, it classified career stagnation theoretically and stipulated realistic judgment standards. The classification of career stagnation fell into two categories: two dimension classification and three dimension classification. Two dimension classification adopted growing willing and realizing capacity of sustainable growing as dimensions, and thus divided into three types of stagnation: subjective stagnation, objective stagnation and combined stagnation. While three dimension classification used motivation, capacity and opportunity to distinguish the stagnation from seven types: subjective type, constrained type, failure type, aspiration type, satisfactory type, encouragement type and limit type. After establishment of classifications, it was necessary to offer operational definitions for career stagnation for further empirical study. Therefore, judgment standards were stipulated by means of factor integration In chapter 6, it explored the relations between occupational stagnation and perceived organizational support and reached three important conclusions: 1) As to organizational support, employee in the state of stagnation had lower degree of perception significantly than employee not in the state of stagnation. 2) Employees perceiving better organizational support were more inclined to take positive countermeasures of problem-concentration; while employees perceiving less organizational support were more inclined to take negative countermeasures of problem-concentration or emotion-concentration. 3) Employees in the states of different stagnation types aspired different organizational supports. These conclusions provided proofs in stipulating countermeasures for stagnation. In chapter 7, it was mainly to set up the management strategies for career stagnation based on previous study and empirical conclusions. Combing perceived organizational support with human resource reengineering technologies, it put forward four primary countermeasures: highlighting governance of career stagnation, implementing different measures for significant organizational supports, enabling employee in the state of stagnation to perceive the organizational supports better, and utilizing human resource reengineering technology. Finally, it summarized the whole dissertation and indicated directions for the future study.