The impact of career boundarylessness on subjective career success: The role of career compentencies, career autonomy, and career insecurity - Colakoglu (2011) - Article

Traditional careers are associated with rapid, upward mobility in a single hierarchy. This has been replaced by a boundaryless career, which is unpredictable and disorderly, associated with frequent horizontal mobility. In these careers, only individuals themselves can meaningfully define their own career, based on their own standards, needs, values and career stages. Study's suggest that boundaryless careers can both be positive and negative to one's attainment of subjective career succes. Career succes is the individuals feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction with their career. Boundaryless careers can give people extensive autonomy, but on the other hand, boundaryless careers can also pursuit a relatively discontinuous, idiosyncratic boundaryless career, with few external guides. That can be very stressful. Literature lacks empirical assessments of the consequences of having boundaryless careers. 

What are the effects of career boundarylessness? 

According to the enactment perspective, individuals are considered to be main agents in managing and shaping their own careers. Career boundarylessness should depict the extensive interorganizational mobility and non-linearity positively influences career autonomy. Career autonomy is the extent to which individuals perceive the freedom and discretion to determine and influence the pacing, shape, and direction of their careers. Career boundarylessness can also be an important stressor, because it can lead to career insecurity. 

What is the relation between career boundarylessness and career competences? 

Boundaryless careers are characterized by mobility not only across organizations but also across occupations. These careers are expected to enhance the development of the employee. “Soul searching” through career self exploration triggered by constant mobility would help individuals to better understand what is important for them in terms of career aspirations, needs, and preferences. Pursuing a boundaryless career contributes positively to the development of knowing-why, knowing-how, and knowing-whom competencies by providing opportunities for individuals to develop and accumulate these competencies. 

What is the role of career competencies in the development of career autonomy? 

Individuals with extensive knowing-how competencies have a set of career-relevant skills and knowledge. Extensive knowing-how competencies can provide a substantial amount of negotiation power to influence the time, speed, and terms of individuals' employment. Individuals equipped with knowing-why competencies are considered to have an extensive understanding of their selfconcept and the ability to use this understanding to make career decisions that are compatible with their self-concept. Self-awareness provides guidance and direction needed in effective career management. Individuals with knowing-whom competencies have the ability to develop and utilize a wide network of relationships that can provide information, influence, guidance, and support for them. Individualswith extensive knowing-whomcompetencies can influence their careers more than people with less extensive knowing-whom competencies because with the help of their network connections they can pursue self-directed career paths. 

What is the relationshop between career competencies and career insecurity? 

Insecurity is when you feel powerless to maintain continuous employment in your career. When you develop career competencies, career insecurity should decline. Individuals with extensive knowing-how competencies have a broad, flexible, and transferable knowledge and skill base that reduces career insecurity. People with knowing-why competencies have an extensive understanding of their self-concept and they know the motivational force behind their actions. These individuals can manage their careers more effectively because they are able to set realistic career goals and develop strategies to achieve these goals. Extensive knowing-whom competencies create a similar impact on career insecurity, because they have large networks with disconnectec contacts, which provides access to opportunities. Studies suggest that having knowing-why, knowing-how, and knowing-whom competencies reduces career insecurity by enabling individuals to maintain continuous employment with desirable characteristics when pursuing a boundaryless career. 

What is the effect of career autonomy on subjective career succes?

Person-career fit is the extent to which your career experiences are compatible with your values, interests and talents. When you have career autonomy, you can influence your career by making choices compatible with your values. The person-career fit can promote subjective career succes, because when you pursue careers that are compatible with your self-concept, you will be more satisfied. That in turn makes it more easy to achieve personally meaningful career outcomes. 

What is the effect of career insecurity on subjective career sucess? 

Career insecurity might make it difficult to make meaningful career choices. When you have a positive self-concept and positive career experiences, that increases the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction with your career. might impair individuals' ability to make personally meaningful career choices. To gain understanding of your possibilities, you need to understand your values, needs, interests, abilities, and motives. Excessive worrying about your career security creates stress and anxiety, which makes it harder to focus on self-exploration. 

Career insecurity can also negatively influence individuals' ability to successfully attain personally meaningful career outcomes. Even if you have an accurate understanding of your self-concept, career insecurity can prevent actual attainment in your career. Certain outcomes require the development of appropriate strategies, such as persistence. When you feel powerless, you are impaired and you don't have the ability to develop effective strategies to attain the outcomes you want. 

How did they collect their data? 

The study was designed to examine the relationship between career boundarylessness and subjective career success. The study used a sample that respresented various industries, organizational ranks and occupations. The data was collected by a self-administered electronic survey. Potential respondents were contacted either by email which described the purpose of the study and contained the URL to the survey and they got reminders after. 201 usable surveys had been obtained from the respondents yielding a response rate of 5%. The study's career satisfaction scale consisted of 5 items with a 5- point scale. In testing the hypothesized structural model, the fully mediated hypothesized model was compared with partially mediated and non-mediated models in order to assess whether the effects of career boundarylessness on career autonomy and career insecurity were direct or indirect through the three career competencies. 

What are the results of this analysis? 

•  The hypothesized knowing-why and knowing-how competencies models were compared with a number of nested models. The hypothesized knowing-why competencies model was kept as the best fitting model for the study.  
• Hypothesis 1 predicted a positive relation between career boundarylessness and the three career competencies. The study indicaated partial support for that, because the relationship between career boundarylessness and the external knowing-whom competencies was not statistically significant
• Respondents who developed the three career competencies reported higher career autonomy.
• Respondents who developed the three career competencies reported lower career insecurity.
• Career autonomy positively impacts subjective career success
• Career insecurity negatively impacts subjective career success

What do these results say? 

This study provides support for the positive relationshop between career boundarylessness and the knowing why and knowing how. It indiccates that experiencing a boundaryless career, it enhances career actors' opportunities to develop a deeper understanding of their own identity, skills and knowledge. There is no significant relationshop between career boundarylessness and external knowing whom comptetence, even though it was hypothesized to be, because of the notion that career mobility across differend organizations becomes instrumental for career actors. It is possible that for individuals to form an extensive network of relationships outside of their current organization they need to exceed a certain level of boundarylessness in their careers.

As expected, the three career competencies—knowing-why, knowing-whom, and external knowing-whom—were positively related to career autonomy and negatively related to career insecurity. Furthermore, career autonomy was found to be instrumental in attaining subjective career success. The results also supported the negative relationship between career insecurity and career satisfaction. Finally, the present study developed its own measure of career boundarylessness construct that included three separate structural indicators of career boundarylessness—frequency, type, and direction. Two careers with exactly the same mobility patterns could be perceived to be less or more boundaryless by two different career actors. 

What are the limitations of this study? 

The research was cross-sectional and only a correlational research, so there is no certainty about the causal relationships. Besides,  the study used self-report scales, which creates a possibility of common method variance. Also, the study's relatively low response rate can be an indication for non-response bias. Finally, the sample mostly consists of white, male  American MBA and Executive MBA alumni and students who were attending a private university in the United States, so the results may not be generalizable.