The Impacts Of Boundaryless Career And Protean Career Attitude Toward Career Success:the Mediation Effect Of Career Adaptability

In the late20th century, with economy developing and new employment situation emerging, industrial-organizational psychologists present two new career types relative to traditional career:protean career and boundaryless career. Protean career includes self-directed dimension, which means the employee himself leading his career development, and values directed dimension, which means employee’s career behaviors driving by his own values. Boundaryless career includes boundaryless mindset, which means psychological mobility during one’s career, and organizational mobility, which means physical mobility during one’s career. The definition and dimension of career success is changed when the new career attitude proposed, and employees no longer count on their organization or company developing their career, but choose their ideal job and start their career through the inter net, benefiting from great information source and new form of employer-employee contract. The view of career success has become from one assessment index of objective and material aspect to several indexes including objective, subjective and psychological aspects. As the economic background and the state of Europe’s social division of labor is slightly ahead of our country, they have a flatter organization and freer forms of employment, therefore more new career behaviors emerge. Since the new concept of career established in1996, lots of foreign literatures confirm that, the employees with new career attitude always have higher career adaptability, and get higher career success, which has two dimension: occupational satisfaction and occupation competition. However, traditional career attitude has been deeply rooted in China, few studies are found about new career attitude, which is very likely to bloom among the young people while the labor market become more mature under the trends of internationalization. Therefore, in this research, we explored protean career and boundaryless career under Chinese background, the relationship among new career attitude, career adaptability and career success, we also tried to explain why positive outcomes might result when employee gets new attitude. In this paper, we use method of literature search and questionnaire survey to investigate336employees in different organizations and companies in Beijing, Shanghai, Xi’an, Zhengzhou and other cities. We discuss the relationship among the four variables:protean career, boundaryless career, career adaptability and career success, in the mean time, we try to establishment a theoretical model of attitude-behavior-outcomes. Finally, the limitations of this research and the future direction have been discussed.In particular, this research found the following conclusion:First, protean career attitude have significant differences in marital status, type of organization, the time under employment, job position, the time of changing jobs, but not in gender, age, work experience, education.Second, boundaryless career attitude have significant differences in gender, age, type of organization, the time under employment, job position, but not in marital status, work experience, education, the time of changing jobs.Third, protean career attitude has a positive correlation with career adaptability and career success, protean career attitude can significantly predict career adaptability and career success.Fourth, boundaryless career attitude has a positive correlation with career adaptability and career success, boundaryless career attitude can significantly predict career adaptability and career success.Fifth, career adaptability has partial mediation effect between protean career attitude and career success, career adaptability has complete mediation effect between boundaryless career attitude and career success.