Research Article
The Relationship between Individual Characteristics, Social Capital, and Subjective Career Success by Gender
1 Kyungin Women's College, 2 Sogang University
Published: January 2005 · Vol. 34, No. 1 · pp. 141-166
Full Text
Abstract
In the past, career success has been defined by the number of promotions, annual compensation or position level. So studies on career success have been focussed on finding factors affecting the objective career success. But as today’s organizations no longer offer lifelong employment, individuals put stress on psychological satisfaction with his overall career and employability in the open labor market rather than rapid promotion or high compensation in an organization. That is, shift in employment contracts from relational to transactional infers a paradigm shift in career success. Therefore, in this study subjective career success was measured in terms of two dimensions: career satisfaction and employability. Through literature review, personal characteristics(growth needs, political behavior disposition) and social capital(supervisor support, informal network) were chosen as the predictors of dependent variable, which were not given much attention before. So the first purpose of this research is to investigate how these affect the subjective career success. Second, seeing that highly-educated female workforce has been continuously increased, women’s career is an important issue for female themselves and the organizations that employ women; therefore, gender was chosen as the moderating variable To achieve the purpose of this research, data were collected in 21 American and European banks acting in Korea by questionnaire. Also the sample was restricted to individuals with more than 5 year working experiences, for individuals need to look back over their career. In order to test hypotheses, actually 201 samples were analyzed with multiple regression analysis. Results is that growth needs, political behavior disposition and supervisor support had positive effects on career satisfaction and that the factors affecting employability were growth needs, political behavior disposition and informal network. Furthermore it was analyzed if gender moderates the relationship between independent variables and dependent variables. Gender moderated the relationships; supervisor support and career satisfaction, supervisor support and employability, informal network and employability. But gender did not moderate the relationship between personal characteristics and subjective career success. The implications of this research may be summarized as follows. First, career success was defined by career satisfaction and employability, which reflect the change of employment contract, people’s value, etc. Second, there was difference in factors that affect male’s and female’s career success; supervisor support and informal network did affect career satisfaction and employability differently between men and women. Therefore, organizations need to support women employees so that they can make the career success.
