Content area
Full Text
Using the contest- and sponsored-mobility perspectives as theoretical guides, this meta-analysis reviewed 4 categories of predictors of objective and subjective career success: human capital, organizational sponsorship, sociodemographic status, and stable individual differences. Salary level and promotion served as dependent measures of objective career success, and subjective career success was represented by career satisfaction. Results demonstrated that both objective and subjective career success were related to a wide range of predictors. As a group, human capital and sociodemographic predictors generally displayed stronger relationships with objective career success, and organizational sponsorship and stable individual differences were generally more strongly related to subjective career success. Gender and time (date of the study) moderated several of the relationships examined.
Career success is of concern not only to individuals but also to organizations because employees' personal success can eventually contribute to organizational success (Judge, Higgins, Thoresen, & Barrick, 1999). Consequently, researchers continue to try to identify the individual and organizational factors that facilitate employees' career success (e.g., Boudreau, Boswell, & Judge, 2001; Judge & Bretz, 1994; Seibert & Kraimer, 2001; Wayne, Liden, Kraimer, & Graf, 1999). Although several studies have taken broad-based multivariate approaches to identifying the predictors of career success (e.g., Kirchmeyer, 1998; Seibert & Kraimer, 2001), there have not been large-scale systematic attempts to summarize the existing literature.
A quantitative review of the career success literature is important for several reasons. First, a critical review and synthesis of a body of research can play an important role in construct development and theory building (Reichers & Schnieder, 1990). In the career success arena, this would be especially useful given the large number of studies on the topic and the large variability in findings across individual studies. Second, scholars have used various operationalizations of career success and some argue that objective indicators (e.g., salary, promotion) are conceptually distinct from subjective indicators (e.g., career satisfaction; Greenhaus, Parasuraman, & Wormley, 1990; Judge, Cable, Boudreau, & Bretz, 1995). As such, it would be theoretically valuable to review and compare the predictors of these two components of career success in order to guide the future research and theory building.
In this study, we provide a comprehensive meta-analysis of the predictors of objective and subjective career success. In doing so, we utilize two prominent...