Employability and Career Success Across the LifeSpan

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Employability and Career Success Across the
Life-Span

• Age as moderator in the Relationship Between
  Self- Versus Supervisor Ratings of Employability
  and Career Success
• Beatrice Van der Heijden, Maastricht School of
  Management, Open University of the Netherlands,
  University of Twente
• Annet De Lange, University of Groningen, the
  Netherlands
• Evangelia Demerouti, Utrecht University, the
  Netherlands
• Claudia van der Heijde, University of Twente, the
  Netherlands

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Introduction

• Employability (or career potential) is seen as a
  prerequisite for career success (cf. Van der
  Heijde Van der Heijden, 2006).
• Far-reaching changes in the workforce (ageing and
  dejuvenization) that necessitate further
  empirical research on ageing and careers.
• Career management only possible given a thorough
  understanding of what constitutes ones
  employability.

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Aims of the Study

• Firstly, to test the operationalization of
  employability, and to investigate whether the
  factor structure for self-reported versus
  supervisor-rated employability is similar across
  two age groups of workers (youngsters versus
  over-forties).
• Secondly, we examine the predictive validity of
  employability in the light of objective career
  success, using two sources of raters (employees
  and their immediate supervisors).

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Aims of the Study

• Thirdly, this study aims to examine whether age
  of the employee moderates the relationship
  between self- and supervisor ratings of
  employability, on the one hand, and objective
  career success, on the other.

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Employability

• The continuous fulfilling, acquiring or creating
  of work through the optimal use of competences
  (Van der Heijde Van der Heijden, 2006).

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Five Dimensions of Employability

• Occupational Expertise
• Anticipation and Optimization
• Personal Flexibility
• Corporate Sense
• Balance.

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Career Success

• The accumulated interaction between a variety of
  individual, organizational and societal norms,
  behaviors, and work practices (Boudreau,
  Boswell, Judge, 2001), and refers to real or
  objective, and perceived or subjective
  accomplishments of individuals in their work
  lives.

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Multi-Rater or Multi-Source Ratings

• For example, from supervisors, peers,
  subordinates, and customers, instead of relying
  on appraisals from a single source.
• The rationale behind this is that different
  evaluation perspectives offer unique and valuable
  information, and thus incremental validity to the
  assessment of individual performance.

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Hypotheses

• We expect an equivalent factor structure of the
  employability construct among the rater groups
  (employees and supervisors), and we advocate the
  comparability of the different rater group
  scores. Moreover, in line with previous research,
  we expect a similar factor structure across
  different age groups of workers (Hypothesis 1).

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Hypotheses

• Employability is positively associated with
  career success (Hypothesis 2 for self-rated, and
  Hypothesis 3 for supervisor-rated employability).

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Hypotheses

• Age moderates the relationship between supervisor
  ratings of employability and objective career
  success. More specifically, we expect stronger
  relationships between supervisor-rated
  employability and career success of the
  youngsters versus the over-forties (Hypothesis
  4).

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Hypotheses

• Age moderates the relationship between
  self-ratings of employability and objective
  career success. More specifically, we expect a
  relatively stronger relationship between
  self-rated employability and career success for
  the over-forties, compared to their younger
  counterparts (Hypothesis 5).

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Explanations for the Moderating Effect of Age

• Negative stereotypical beliefs about older
  workers (Boerlijst, Van der Heijden, Van Assen,
  1993 Offerman Gowing, 1990).
• Increased P-E fit for older workers (Watkins
  Subich, 1995 Wright Hamilton, 1978).

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Methodology

• The employability measure in our model has been
  filled in by both parties (employees and their
  immediate supervisors), in order to enable us to
  investigate the factor structure depending upon
  rater source and age group, and for testing our
  model hypotheses.

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Methodology

• In order to increase the validity of the
  findings, instructions regarding cross-checking
  as well as anonimity have been used (Mabe West,
  1982).

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Methodology

• N 303 pairs of employees and supervisors
  working at a large Dutch company producing
  building materials (response rate was 91.8).
• 83.5 male and 16.5 female employees.
• Mean age employees 41 years (sd 9.15).
• Mean organizational tenure employees 10.74 (sd
  9.61).

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Methodology

• 95.0 male and 5 female supervisors.
• Mean age supervisors 43 years
• (sd 7.96).

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Measures

• Employability (1) occupational expertise (15
  items) (2) anticipation and optimization (8
  items) (3) personal flexibility (8 items) (4)
  corporate sense (7 items) (5) balance (9 items).
  

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Measures

• Objective Career Success (Gattiker Larwood,
  1986) (three single items) (1)
  organization-specific objective hierarchical
  success (2) overall objective hierarchical
  success (3) current gross income.

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Results

• All employability measures demonstrated good
  internal consistencies, for both groups of
  raters.
• The correlations between the supervisor-rated
  employability dimensions are high, while these
  are somewhat lower for the self-ratings.

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Results

• The agreement between self- and supervisor
  ratings for the same employability dimension
  ranges from .22 to .37.
• Moreover, all supervisor ratings of employability
  appear to be unrelated to objective career
  success outcomes, which might indeed indicate
  that possible moderators, like age, are involved.

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Results

• However, regarding the self-reported ratings of
  employability, six out of the fifteen possible
  correlations with the three objective career
  success outcomes are significant but rather weak,
  which again points to the influence of possible
  moderators.

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Preliminary Analyses

• Males had relatively higher objective career
  success scores compared with the females.
• Both males and females had higher scores for the
  number of promotions in entire career compared
  with the number of organization-specific
  promotions.

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Preliminary Analyses

• Tenure was positively related to organizational
  promotions, and negatively to overall promotions.
• Given the outcomes of previous studies, we
  decided to include gender, educational
  qualification, and tenure as control variables in
  the subsequent analyses (see also Ng, Eby,
  Sorensen, Feldman, 2005).

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Multi-Group Confirmatory Factor Analyses (CFA)

• We compared the fit of the two-factor model with
  the fit of alternative models, including a model
  with only one latent factor (employability), and
  two-factor models in which, respectively, the
  factor loadings, error variances, correlation
  between the factors, and the factor variances
  were constrained to be equal in both age groups.

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Results

• The two-factor model had a satisfactory fit.
  Moreover, all indicators had a significant
  loading on the respective factor for both the
  younger and the older employees.
• More importantly, this model appeared to fit
  significantly better compared with the one-factor
  (employability) model, supporting a similar
  factor structure across the two rater groups,
  that is, employees and their immediate
  supervisors.

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Results

• Constraining, respectively, the factor loadings,
  error variances, correlation between the factors,
  and the factor variances to be equal for both
  younger and older employees did not result in a
  significantly worse fit compared with the
  two-factor model with free parameters.

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Results CFA

• Hypothesis 1 is confirmed The factor structure
  is indeed equivalent for both age groups.

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Results SEM analyses

• Self-reported employability was positively
  related to overall promotions. This provides
  partial support for Hypothesis 2.
• Supervisor-rated employability was significantly,
  but negative, related to overall promotions. This
  implies that Hypothesis 3 is to be rejected.

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Results Multi-Group SEM for the Younger Employees

• Self-reported employability was significantly and
  positively related to both overall promotions and
  current gross income.
• The supervisor ratings were positively related to
  current gross income.

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Results Multi-Group SEM for the Younger Employees

• Gender was negatively related to both self- and
  supervisor ratings of employability, as well as
  to income, with females having lower scores
  compared to males.
• Educational qualification and organizational
  tenure, however, were positively related to
  supervisor ratings of employability.

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Results Multi-Group SEM for the Younger Employees

• Moreover, organizational tenure appeared to be
  positively related to the amount of
  organization-specific promotions.

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Results Multi-Group SEM for the Older Employees

• Self-reported employability was positively
  related to overall promotions, while supervisor
  ratings were negatively related to overall
  promotions.
• All other structural relationships appeared to be
  non-significant.

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Results Multi-Group SEM for the Older Employees

• Moreover, organizational tenure was negatively
  related to both supervisor and self-rated
  employability, and positively to
  organization-specific promotions.

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Implications Multi-Group SEM

• Hypothesis 4 (stronger positive relationships
  between supervisor-rated employability and career
  success of the youngsters versus the
  over-forties) is partly supported.
• Hypothesis 5 (relatively stronger relationship
  between self-rated employability and career
  success for the over-forties, compared to their
  younger counterparts) is to be rejected.

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Outcomes and Implications of the Psychometric
Analyses

• Our results confirmed a two-factor model
  (self-reported employability and supervisor-rated
  employability), comprising five employability
  indicators.

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The Relationship between Employability and
Objective Career Success

• For self-reported employability, the hypothesis
  is partly supported.
• However, in case the supervisor ratings were
  used, we have found a negative relationship with
  overall promotions, which is contradictory to our
  assumptions.

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The Relationship between Employability and
Objective Career Success

• It might be that an instrumental style of
  leadership plays an important role (Boerlijst,
  Van der Heijden, Van Assen, 1993).
• In case of high employee career potential,
  supervisor restrains the employee from moving to
  another job or to another field.

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Outcomes and Implications of the Test of the
Career Success Enhancing Employability Model
Moderated by Age

• Highly different results have been found for the
  over-forties compared to the youngsters.
• Possibly, our results reconfirm our ideas
  regarding the prevalence of age-related
  differences in supervisory attitudes towards
  their employees (see Van der Heijden, 1998).

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Outcomes and Implications of the Test of the
Career Success Enhancing Employability Model
Moderated by Age

• It is conceivable that for the over-forties in
  particular, the instrumental style of leadership
  plays an important role (Boerlijst, Van der
  Heijden, Van Assen, 1993).

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Limitations and Recommendations for Further
Research

• Possibility of response set consistencies as all
  data have been collected using questionnaires.
• Cross-sectional approach implies need for further
  research to address the issue of causality.

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Limitations and Recommendations for Further
Research

• Generalizability to other occupational settings
  and/or other countries has to be investigated.

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Practical Implications

• Human Resource policies should be rooted into a
  so-called conservation model instead of the
  long-adhered depreciation model (Yeats, Folts,
  Knapp, 2000).
• Especially, the employees immediate supervisor
  should bear responsibility to enhance life-long
  learning.

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Practical Implications

• With an age-conscious HRM policy, that is aimed
  to guide the amount of employability, ageing does
  not need to pose a threat.
• The employability instrument (Van der Heijde
  Van der Heijden, 2006) has high practical value
  in the light of enhancing life-long career
  success.