Study On Career Plateau Construction And Its Correlation With Job Burnout

Career plateau refers to a phenomenon that in a certain stage of an individual's career development, the possibility of his promotion, and the increase of his responsibility and challenge are very small. Studies towards it began at abroad in the late 1970's. The former studies were all one-dimensional by means of objective measure. Georgia Chao (1990) proposed that perceptual measure in career plateau is more proper than objective measure, and hence instead, in the late 1990's the researchers began the two-dimensional and four-dimensional studies by means of perceptual measure. Researchers have just begun to pay attention to career plateau in China. Few empirical studies have they done towards it, and they also lack proper scale with both good reliability and validity.This paper takes Jacob Joseph's (1996) research results as the theoretical framework, agreeing that career plateau has four dimensions, namely, structural plateau, content plateau, personal choice plateau and job skill plateau. With reference to the theoretical and confirmatory studies abroad, the author of this paper compiles the original questionnaire of career plateau.For one thing, open interviews have been carried out to find various reasons that cause the career plateau phenomenon. For another, the 12-item questionnaire of the structure and content career plateaus, which is widely used abroad, has been translated and then revised. At last, a 20-item questionnaire is compiled, which becomes a 16-item questionnaire after being tested.In the first measurement, after doing the exploratory factor analysis twice, the four factors are carried out successfully and 3 items are deleted. In the end the final questionnaire includes 13 items. The alpha coefficient of the whole questionnaire is 0.676, which means that the reliability of this questionnaire is good. Moreover, construct validity analysis, content validity analysis and criterion validity analysis prove that the validity of this questionnaire is also good.In the survey, the author chooses the staff of Henan tobacco system as the samples and uses Career Plateau Inventory and Job Burnout Inventory to do the measurement. First, the confirmatory factor analysis shows that the model's goodness of fit is quite good. Second, the influence of the statistic variable on the different dimensions of career plateau is also explored here. Furthermore, correlation studies show that structural plateau, content plateau, personal choice plateau are correlated significantly with the three dimensions of job burnout, and that skill plateau is correlated significantly with reduced personal accomplishment dimension of job burnout. In the end, the author puts forward nine suggestions to deal with the career plateau phenomenon in the human resource management.