Lan Yujuan, Chen Zhixia
College of Public Administration, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.
Career Development Center, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan, China.
Front Psychol. 2020 Jan 10;10:2922. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02922. eCollection 2019.
Career adaptability is a set of individual resources that benefit one's sustainable development in his/her lifelong careers, especially in today's turbulent environment. However, how to foster employees' career adaptability through managerial strategies and eventually contribute to organizations remains to be studied. Guided by the career construction theory, we posit a moderated mediation model that transformational leadership (TFL) could strengthen employees' career adaptability and further foster their task performance and organization-directed citizenship behavior (OCBO), with task variety moderating the mediation effect. We conducted a three-wave survey with 558 supervisor-employee dyads to test the overall model. The results validated that career adaptability mediated the links between TFL and task performance as well as OCBO. Furthermore, the mediation effect was stronger for employees who had higher levels of task variety. In short, our study offers the groundwork to understand that employees' career adaptability can be activated by transformational leaders and is self-regulatory to benefit work behaviors in the task variety context. It enlightens organizations to cultivate employees' career adaptability in the way of TFL and job design, with the objective of promoting the sustainable development for both the employees and the organizations.
职业适应性是一组个人资源，有助于个人在其终身职业生涯中实现可持续发展，尤其是在当今动荡的环境中。然而，如何通过管理策略培养员工的职业适应性并最终为组织做出贡献仍有待研究。以职业建构理论为指导，我们提出了一个有调节的中介模型，即变革型领导（TFL）可以增强员工的职业适应性，并进一步促进他们的任务绩效和组织导向的公民行为（OCBO），任务多样性调节中介效应。我们对558对主管-员工进行了三轮调查，以检验整个模型。结果验证了职业适应性在TFL与任务绩效以及OCBO之间起中介作用。此外，对于任务多样性水平较高的员工，中介效应更强。简而言之，我们的研究为理解员工的职业适应性可以被变革型领导者激活并且具有自我调节作用以在任务多样性背景下有益于工作行为提供了基础。它启发组织通过TFL和工作设计的方式培养员工的职业适应性，以促进员工和组织的可持续发展。
