مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Participants and Procedure ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT Career adaptability and strategic competence 11 The data for this study were collected in 2014 through an online survey (see Yang, Guan, Lai, She, & Lockwood, 2015). With the help of an association for human resource management professionals, e-mails were sent inviting participants to take part. These participants were also asked to forward the emails to their peers. Participation was voluntary and participants did not receive financial rewards. Two hundred and twenty full-time Chinese human resource management professionals (85 males and 135 females), from various organizations, completed the survey. Of these, 37.3% of participants were at basic managerial level (e.g., HRM specialists), 29.1% were at supervisor level, 27.3% were at department manager level, and 6.4% were at HRVP level. In terms of age distribution, 6.4% were between 21 to 25 years; 33.6% were between 26 and 30 years; 32.7% were from 31 to 35 years; 9.1% were from 36 to 40 years; 12.7% were from 41 to 45; 3.2% were from 46 to 50 years; 2.3% were 51 years or above. Participants worked for different types of organizations: state-owned (57.3%), privately-owned (15.5%), foreign-invested (25.5%), or others (1.7%).

The Career Adapt-Abilities Scale. The Chinese version of the Career Adapt-Abilities Scale (Hou, Leung, Li, Li, & Xu, 2012) was used to measure participants’ career adaptability. The scale contains four subscales, with 6 items each, to measure the adaptive resources of concern, control, curiosity and confidence respectively. Respondents rated each item on a scale from 1 (“not strong”) to 5 (“strongest”). Cronbach’s alpha coefficients for the four scales ranged from .83 to .88 (see Table 1). For the global indicator, Cronbach’s Professional Identification. Professional identification was measured using a previously validated scale (Hekman et al., 2009), which consisted of four items. Response options ranged from 1 (‘‘strongly disagree’’) to 5 (‘‘strongly agree’’). An example of the items is “In general, when someone praises HR managers, it feels like a personal compliment”. The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was .

Career Variety. Based on previous research (Crossland et al., 2014), participants were asked to report the specific number of different sectors, firms and functional areas that they had worked for on three items, for instance, ‘‘How many different sectors have you worked for since you had your first full-time job?”. The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was .71 and the mean score of these three items was used to represent HR managers’ career variety