The role of temporal focus, dispositional employability, and training on the perceived internal career prospects of talents

Abstract

In this paper, we study employability in the group of talented employees. We explore how employees’ temporal focus affects their dispositional employability and how dispositional employability influences their perceived internal career prospects. We also examine the moderating role of training perceived as developmental on the relationship between dispositional employability and perceived internal career prospects. Upon examination of these relationships within an organization that has a closed talent management approach, we find support for the hypothesized mediating and moderating relationships. Present and future focus were positively related to talents’ dispositional employability, which in turn increased their perception of career prospects in the current company. The latter relationship was stronger among talents who perceived that they had received training for more important positions than those who did not. The results advanced current knowledge of antecedents and outcomes of employability in the specific group of talents and shed light on the organizational practices that may help with talent retention.

Keywords:

• Dispositional employability
• talents
• temporal focus
• perceived internal career prospects
• training perceived as developmental

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We thank one anonymous reviewer and the editorial team for their suggestion of this important point.

2 We also tried to replicate the empirical results with a different operationalization of the dispositional employability scale to show the results were robust. In this approach, we created a composite score of the dispositional employability scale (α = .88) and treated it as a one-item variable in SEM. Then we re-ran the mediation and moderation models with other multi-item variables (temporal focus, perceived internal career prospects, and intrinsic motivation) as latent variables and found similar results. The mediation model achieved an acceptable overall model fit (χ²(235) = 370.30, p < .01, CFI = .961, TLI = .951, SRMR = .047, RMSEA = .047). Past focus (β = -.02, p = ns) was not related to, but present (β = .24, p < .01) and future focus (β = .23, p < .01) were both positively related to dispositional employability, and dispositional employability was positively related to perceived internal career prospect (β = .26, p < .01). The indirect effects of temporal focus on perceived internal career prospects through dispositional employability were significant for present (b = .08, p < .01) and future focus (b = .07, p < .01). The moderation test indicated that the relationship between dispositional employability and perceived internal career prospect was stronger among people who received training (β = .40, p < .001) than among those who did not (β = .21, p < .01, Δχ²(1) = 13.58, p < .01).