مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

The career plateau perceived by employees has been a growing source of organizational concern (Allen, Russell, Poteet, & Dobbins, 1999; Hofstetter & Cohen, 2014). Considerable evidence indicates that reaching a career plateau may result in negative consequences, such as decreased job and career satisfaction (Chang, 2003; McCleese & Eby, 2006), reduced organizational commitment (McCleese & Eby, 2006), unsatisfactory performance (Stout, Slocum, & Cron, 1988), and increased intention to quit (Hofstetter & Cohen, 2014). The career plateau was traditionally defined as a point in one’s career beyond which promotion becomes highly unlikely (Ference, Stoner, & Warren, 1977), followed by Feldman and Weitz’s (1988) extension of the connotation of little likelihood of obtaining assignments of increased responsibility. This traditional view focuses on a hierarchical (or structural) plateau, which concerns employees’ vertical movement in the organization (Allen et al., 1999; Bardwick, 1986) and has been dominantly studied in the career plateau literature (ArmstrongStassen, 2008; Xie, Lu, & Zhou, 2015). However, advances in research suggest that in addition to experiencing a hierarchical plateau, employees may also experience the job content plateau, which occurs when employees are no longer challenged by work or job responsibilities (Bardwick, 1986).

Recent scholars point out that our currently changing business environments (e.g., the popularity of boundary-less careers and unpredictability of organizational downsizing and restructuring) have made understanding and addressing the job content plateau particularly important (Hofstetter & Cohen, 2014; McCleese & Eby, 2006). There is also research suggesting that the job content plateau is related to more negative employee attitudes and, compared to the hierarchical plateau, can be more detrimental to the organization (Allen, Poteet, & Russell, 1998). Emerging efforts thus have been devoted to exploring various antecedents of the job content plateau to identify useful strategies for solving issues caused by this type of plateau. For example, research has identified antecedents such as tenure, education, personality, work centrality, mentoring, supervisory and coworker support, and perceived respect (Armstrong-Stassen, 2008; Hofstetter & Cohen, 2014). Despite this informed evidence, our knowledge of the factors influencing the job content plateau is limited because the current literature has largely overlooked some important characteristics associated with the resolution of the career plateau (Hofstetter & Cohen, 2014). For instance, the process of coping with the job content plateau involves self-regulating one’s own psychological states to resume positive attitudes toward job or career duties (McCleese, Eby, Scharlau, & Hoffman, 2007; Milliman, 1992). This perspective suggests that personal factors that reflect self-regulatory competences may provide a relatively new lens through which to study the job content plateau.

The present study aims to advance this area by examining career adaptability as an antecedent of the job content plateau. Career adaptability involves self-regulatory capacities in career development (Savickas & Porfeli, 2012) and is regarded as a psychosocial construct that resides at people’s interactions with the environment and reflects their psychological resources for dealing with work and career challenges (Savickas, 1997). It involves a range of “attitudes, competencies, and behaviors that individuals use in fitting themselves to work that suits them” (Savickas, 2013, p. 45). Such attributes of career adaptability may facilitate individuals in overcoming career plateaus. The current study also examines the mechanisms of the relationship between career adaptability and the job content plateau by testing the mediating effects of person-environment fit perceptions (i.e., person-job fit and personorganization fit). The person-environment fit perspective is chosen because career development is driven by dynamic adaptation to one’s associated environments with an emphasis on person-environment congruence (Guan et al., 2013; Savickas, 2005), and also because the career plateau is argued to be a person-environment interaction process (Hall, 1987). Specifically, drawing on career construction theory (Savickas, 1997, 2005), it is proposed that career adaptability allows employees better to fit into their jobs and organizations, which in turn, based on person-environment fit theory (Edwards, Caplan, & Van Harrison, 1998), reduces the likelihood of experiencing the job content plateau.