An Exploratory Look at the Plateauism Construct

Abstract

This study was focused on the definition and distinction of the career plateauism construct. An exploratory factor analysis performed on a sample of 515 managers (403 men, 112 women) revealed the potential existence of different forms of the construct. Two reliable measures of plateauism emerged—the structural measure and the content measure—with reliability values of .82 and .70, respectively. The difference between the structural and content types of plateauism is important to managers, who need to advise employees on the impact of structural plateauism while removing or preventing the existence of content plateauism. As a step in research needed to shed some light in this area of plateauism, the different functions of the two separate measures explored in this study should clarify some of the previous inconsistent findings.