Self-directed career management and mobility: the risk of lock-in effects from person–job fit

Abstract

Autonomy and fit with the job are important reasons why employees thrive at work, yet surprisingly little research has examined the implications this may have on how employees perceive their career opportunities, both within and outside the organization where they currently work. Drawing on self-determination theory, we propose that the more employees manage their career in a self-directed manner, the more likely they are to consider themselves to have good career opportunities both within and outside their current organization. However, we propose that, while good person–job fit may push an employee to see increasing opportunities within their current organization, it is equally likely to make the employee less inclined to see opportunities for career advancement outside the organization. Analyses on data gathered from a sample of 902 knowledge workers support our model. We conclude that person–job fit strongly influences the degree to which employees perceive opportunities for internal and external career mobility. The results have implications for research on self-directed career management, person–job fit, and the dynamics of the career mobility issue.

Keywords:

• Self-directed career management
• psychological career mobility
• self-determination
• person–job fit
• employee perceptions

Acknowledgement

We thank Rebecca Piekkari and Tomi Seppälä for their feedback on the survey that was used to collect the data for this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This is second-highest percentage in the world, after Iceland (OECD, 2016a).

2 It is difficult to ascertain the exact response rate for the study since the email invitation was sent to participants through the trade unions; thus, we do not have data on how many of the invitations were sent to inactive email addresses.

3 We also tested all other models in Table 2 without career satisfaction and the hypothesized directions and significances remained the same.