Career success is a major field in the study of human resource management. Also career success is deeply concerned about employees and organizations, especially in organizations with no borders which provide many careers today. Employees can no longer be relied just on objective measures such as wages, job titles, authority and so on for indexes to measure career success. Subjective career success is more and more important for employees. This article attempts to make a summary on subjective career success definition using empirical research and putting forward the direction of future research.
Career success has been a motivation for a long time. Scholars used work satisfaction to represent career success at first. Hughes divided career successes into objective career success and subjective career success [
Subjective career success is more and more important for employees. This article attempts to make a summary on subjective career success definition using empirical research and putting forward the direction of future research.
Jim Meade suggested that career success was the result of personal experience and could be seen as personal experience and the accumulation of real or perceived accomplishments [
Subjective career success can be understood in two ways. First, it’s better to have an integral subjective assessment for career success, some factors may not be under the influence of objective factors; the second explanation for subjective career success is apart from objective factors that requires additional subjective assessments [
About the characteristic structure of subjective career success, Heslin suggested that subjective career success should include realization of goals, self-identity and perceived opportunities for promotion [
Based on the analysis of existing studies, there are three ways for measure subjective career success.
Greenhaus J. H., Parasuraman S., Worry W. M. used the job satisfaction scale to measure the subjective career success [
Turban, Dougherty designed subjective career success questionnaire for measured subjective career success [
Gattiker and Larwood established a measurement for subjective career success that had five dimensions. The five dimensions are relationships, economic status, work, grade status and life success [
Parke, P. & Arthur established a measurement for subjective career success of three dimensions [
There are many studies on the subjective career success antecedent variables, based on the analysis of existing literatures, individual differences, family and organization, this three factors of subjective career success are summarized.
The first individual difference is ability. Fang Wang indicated that personal knowledge and skills have a significant effect on subjective career success. Possibly due to these employees’ previous use of the skills learned on the job, they are able to experience more pleasures of success [
Another individual difference is the employees’ personal strategy to success. Blickle suggested political skills as belonging to one of personal strategies. He found political skills played a positive role on subjective career success. Political skills main include politically sensitivity, interpersonal influence, organizational coordination, and so on [
The effects of family factors on the subjective career success also are an important area of interest. Most studies are focused on the employee’s multiple role stresses including work-life conflict processing as well as the differences between men and women. These factors have caught the attention of the scholars. Weijing, Zhang studied the work family relationship and how it affects subjective career success [
The first one is organization’s sponsorship. Some studies suggested that organization’s sponsorship has a positive effect on subjective career success. Organizations sponsoring includes career guidance, mentoring, parent relations, career support, skill development opportunities generally.
The second one is network behavior. Forret and Dougherty suggested that network includes five parts, they are Social, maintain internal contact, be engaged in the professional network, strengthen internal awareness and participation in community activities. And social networking is becoming more and more important to career self-management, so their network is very important in explaining career success [
Organizational productivity, organizational emotion and employees’ feelings have been proven as outcome variables of subjective career success. Pachulicz’s studies have shown that subjective career success has positive effects on organizational productivity, the perceived of career success not only improve employee job performance, but also employee performance development which is beneficial to the organization [
Schmitt and Kuljanin’s studies have shown that subjective career success enhances organizational emotion, such as organizational commitment [
Adele and Spurk have shown that subjective career success affect employee feelings, such as satisfaction of life and happiness [
There are not many mediator researches of subjective career successes. Nabi confirmed the network behavior played a mediator role between the subjective career success and occupational expectations [
Ming Feng and Cong Li confirmed that the political skills played moderated role between impression management and subjective career success [
First, in measurement of subjective career success, future research should be based on the background of Chinese enterprises, and establish the scale for China’s situation with representative samples.
Second, in definition of subjective career success, the future research should be further clarified the definition of subjective career success, and distinguished with other concepts.
Third, in the mechanism of subjective career success, Chinese scholars should start more empirical research about purely subjective career successes, and use different research methods to explore the antecedent variables, outcome variables of the subjective career success, as well as mediator and mediator variables.
Liangtie Dai,Fuhui Song, (2016) Subjective Career Success: A Literature Review and Prospect. Journal of Human Resource and Sustainability Studies,04,238-242. doi: 10.4236/jhrss.2016.43026