Shifting patterns: How satisfaction alters career change intentions

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Shifting patterns: How satisfaction alters career change intentions Sean P. McGinley Florida State University, Dedman School of Hospitality, 288 Champions Way, UCB 4111, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA

A R T I C LE I N FO

A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Protean career orientation Career variety Career satisfaction Career change intentions Self-determination theory Control theory

Advancing a nascent stream of research linking career attitudes and paths to future professional mobility, this paper investigated how the career satisfaction interacted with both a protean career orientation and career variety to predict the career change intentions of hotel managers. Based on two studies this paper found that, protean career orientation and career variety had effects on career change intentions that were moderated by career satisfaction. Specifically, when hotel managers were less satisfied with their careers they reported as being less likely to continue following their established career path. However, when career satisfaction increased hotel managers were more likely to intend follow their previously established career paths and reported behavioral intentions consistent with their career orientations.

1. Introduction In general, the labor market has changed to be more transactional in nature (Rousseau, 1995), and transactional psychological contracts (even when fulfilled) are more likely to lead to turnover with hospitality leaders (Collins, 2010). Conversely, recent evidence suggests in the hotel industry, positive workplace relationships aid in organizational retention, “…the combined effect of low entry barriers for new entrants and poor financial compensation for positions below executive level confers an inferior status on hospitality careers. Therefore, workplace relationships assume great importance in validating workers’ senses of professional identity” (Mooney et al., 2016 p. 2602. In addition to work being more transactional, the technological, economic, and political changes in the United States have left more workers feeling insecure (Benach et al., 2014). Citing the Threat-Rigidity Hypothesis of Staw et al. (1981); people who perceive threats to their employment will engage in familiar strategies), Shoss (2017) claims as people perceive that their future work conditions will deteriorate resultant of unstable futures they are more likely to commit to previously used strategies to navigate their careers and are less likely to seek out novel outcomes. As a response to the unstable work environment and in support of Shoss (2017) many workers no longer take a “traditional” approach to their careers and have adopted more adaptive, self-directed, and versatile career management strategies (Clarke, 2013; Sullivan and Baruch, 2009), which Mooney et al. (2016) claims is part of the contemporary career in the hotel industry. However, within the neo-career conceptualization of work and careers little work has been conducted on predicting why certain people have adopted attitudes that are reflective of such alternative career paths beyond the more

traditional approaches (Rodrigues and Guest, 2010; Sargent and Domberger, 2007). In addition to the scant research predicting career attitudes, there is paucity in research regarding the effects of those attitudes (Ribbens et al., 2015). The present study focuses on managers in the hotel industry, which has the highest rate of turnover (one indicator of employment instability) in the United States, to better understand the actions people plan to take based on their career attitudes. In 2016 the accommodation and food service sector had the highest rate of people quitting their jobs and the highest rate of total separations (involuntary turnover, layoffs, and furloughs) in the United States economy (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2017). Given the sector had the highest level of voluntary turnover, understanding why is of paramount importance especially considering the industry had a higher rate of hires (75.3%) than it did total separations (72.9%), meaning employment is growing at a time of high voluntary turnover. Managers in this economic sector have an acute need to improve retention rates, while expanding the industry’s labor pool and in order to do so; they must understand the reasons for the high rates of voluntary turnover. More specifically within hospitality research, questions need to be asked and answered regarding why certain population segments of the industry leave the industry altogether on account of hiring rates out pacing total separations indicating a growing demand for labor. Robust research has been conducted on turnover in the hospitality industry, with Carbery, Garavan, O’Brein, and McDonell (2003) finding a series of psychological, perceptual, and affective variables explaining turnover intentions for hotel managers in Ireland. Simons, McLean Parks, and Tomlinson (2017) found hotel workers’ turn over to be related to the integrity of their managers, and in a Chinese context hotel supervisors were found to be more likely to quit when they engaged in

E-mail address: [email protected]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2018.05.003 Received 15 November 2017; Received in revised form 1 March 2018; Accepted 6 May 2018 0278-4319/ © 2018 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Please cite this article as: McGinley, S.P., International Journal of Hospitality Management (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2018.05.003

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motivations that emphasize needs, cognitive processes, and behavioral consequences as a result of an individual trying to maximize pleasure or minimize pain (Ryan and Deci, 2001). Ryan and Deci (2000) proposed a scheme of four motivations that help to explain behavior 1) External Motivation, which explains how people engage in behaviors for rewards; 2) Introjected Motivation, which explains that a person engages in behaviors to avoid feeling guilty; 3) Identified Motivation, which explains that a person engages in behaviors to express values or other personally important feelings; and 4) Integrated Motivation, which explains that a person engages in behaviors to live up to a coherent integrated self-concept. Ryan and Deci suggest external and introjected motivations are perceived as controlling, whereas identified and integrated motivations are perceived as autonomous, because the person’s motivation is intrinsic and consistent with a concept of self. Therefore, a person’s intrinsic motivation may be responsible for determining career behaviors, as Zafar et al. (2017) claimed that as workers became more internally and values motivated they became more likely to take steps to ensure they were employable in the general labor market, not just valuable to their current employers. Self-Determination Theory may, therefore, be applicable to career management activities not just workplace engagement and workplace performance as it is traditionally studied (Jex and Britt, 2008), potentially SDT may play a role in predicting professional mobility as well. The next section will discuss PCO as an attitude, which may help to explain how employees elect to manage their careers, and understanding that their internal motivation may as SDT suggests be to further develop their interests, skills, and live up to their fullest potential. Therefore, this study focuses on a person’s identified motivation, because a career attitude like PCO helps define values, which in turn are expected to explain behaviors, consistent with SDT conceptualization of identified motivation. As such a worker’s career attitudes are likely to be instilled by held values (in the case of PCO Hall (2004) posits the values of: selfdetermination, freedom and growth, being mobile, defining success subjectively, and seeking fulfillment through work) and behaviors are resultant.

emotional labor, but the effect was attenuated when they were able to receive emotional support at the hotel (Xu, Martinez, & Lv, 2017). While turnover has been a focus of hospitality research it is also important to know the reasons for leadership leaving the industry in this dynamic labor market, because managerial career change not only costs more, but also reduces operational productivity for longer stretches of time than line-level turnover (Hinkin and Tracey, 2000). Beyond the costs associated with career change McGinley et al. (2014) identified a loss of industrial resources in the form of competent and trained professionals, and a general lack of attention to the career change phenomenon regarding hotel managers in the hospitality literature. One area that needs further advancement in the scholarly conversation is the views people harbor in unstable labor markets to understand how their attitudes inform future behavior. The present study concerns the most prevalent career attitude in the contemporary careers literature (Hofstetter and Rosenblatt, 2017), which is primarily based on the premise of employees’ self-reliance and willingness to manage their careers independently. The protean career orientation (PCO) is a values-driven concept, where a person is driven by internal values rather than allowing others to define what career success is or how to achieve said success (Briscoe and Hall, 2006; Briscoe et al., 2006; Hall, 2004). The industry’s high rate of turnover (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2017) means colleagues, subordinates, and superiors are all quitting a focal manager’s organization leading to heightened perceptions of poor future workplace conditions. As people turnover they will adopt that same strategy in the future when other people in their organization turnover, if they perceive poor future outcomes related to the company’s loss of human resources (Shoss, 2017), essentially creating a loss spiral. Therefore, in the hospitality industry the neocareer attitude PCO may be a particularly salient variable predicting the outcomes of managers, because as people harbor the attitude they would be hypothesized to respond to the instability of the industry’s labor market by self-directing their careers away from current employers and in doing so may continue to seek out professional mobility as a way to respond to the unstable nature of the industry’s employment dynamics (Shoss, 2017; Staw et al., 1981), and that accumulation of experiences is hypothesized in this study to inform their future behavior. To better study PCO Baruch (2014) developed a measurement scale, and he claimed the field has been hamstrung previously by a lack of a consistent measurement. As a result of the poor measurement, Baruch (2014) posits much of the associations between career attitudes and outcomes are misunderstood and the field will benefit by multiple measurements and the discovery of moderators. Therefore, this study proposes not only will a hotel manager’s level of PCO predict career change, but so will previous protean-like behaviors (protean paths) and this paper also tests for moderated associations. In keeping with Control Theory (Carver and Scheier, 1982) and Self-Determination Theory (Ryan and Deci, 2000) this study proposes that hotel managers may actually intend to manage their careers contrary to their career attitudes and previous professional behaviors. In sum, this study seeks to answer the following questions: How are attitudes and previous behaviors associated with career change intentions, and; Why do hotel managers change careers and leave the hotel industry, while others plan to remain a part of the industry?

2.2. Protean career orientation Organizational scholars have referred to the change in how careers are managed as the “protean career” (Hall, 2004). The PCO differs from the traditional career that was common in the years after the Second World War—in which the organization was the dominant force in learning, succession planning and employee development. Hall (2004) suggests that workers have increasingly shifted from being committed to organizations to being committed to professions, from allowing the organizations for which they work to direct their careers to being selfdirected, and from valuing advancement in one organization to valuing freedom and growth. In part the protean career orientation induces certain professional behaviors as stated, “The protean career orientation [PCO] motivates states such as agency (through self-direction) and clarity (through being values-driven) to guide job search activities, which are more specific states than having a global sense of confidence in self” (Waters et al., 2014 p. 411). Beyond being highly mobile in search of learning and development opportunities, individuals can also take personal responsibility for what opportunities to pursue, as opposed to organizationally sanctioned career progression opportunities, or as Ryan and Deci (2000) would posit in their paper on SDT people who have a protean career orientation are acting on their identified motivation. One of the key aspects of PCO is people are in charge of their own career development and progression, rather than deferring to the organization to map out their own individualized succession plans, as one would have done when planning to be employed by a company for an entire career (Homori, 2010). One way that people can take control of their own development and progression is to engage in lateral moves, or job transitions that take place at the same level of the hierarchy within

2. Literature review 2.1. Self-determination theory Self-Determination Theory is an organismic motivational theory that, “assume[s] that humans are inherently motivated to develop their interests and skills, to connect and contribute to other people, and to move toward their fullest potential” (Sheldon et al., 2003, p. 358). Organismic theories are, therefore, growth-oriented, focusing on peoples’ innate needs for development, unlike hedonic theories of 2

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mechanism for hotel managers is how satisfied they are with their careers, and in turn, their level of satisfaction may act as a comparator. What a hotel manager does in light of such information would be an effector, such as engaging in professional mobility or abstaining from such mobility. Jex and Britt (2008) suggest CT can be used to understand various behaviors in the workplace as stated, “Given its generality, control theory could be used to explain essentially any form of purposeful behavior...Control theory also provides a plausible explanation for why a person may revise his or her goals in the face of repeated failure” (p. 249). Career satisfaction is thus proposed as a moderator in this study, where career satisfaction is the global level of satisfaction with the entirety of an individual’s career (Greenhaus et al., 1990). Career satisfaction is proposed to act as a comparator acting as a way in which hotel managers evaluate their progress towards self-defined career goals and motivate them to make decisions, because as Powers (1973) suggests people will use information they scan from the external environment and their internal state of mind to determine how they are progressing towards a goal. Career satisfaction will be discussed next regarding how it could moderate the association proposed in this study.

an organization (Kong et al. 2012). Ng et al. (2007) argue that horizontal moves can also take place between organizations when an individual remains at the same basic hierarchy level. As Hall (2004) states, the combination of a dynamic contemporary labor market and flatter organizations has changed the typical career progression model to be more unpredictable, to feature more lateral moves, and to present multidirectional development both within and between organizations. The perspectives of Kong et al. (2012) and Ng et al. (2007) suggest that movement has become key to development in the contemporary labor market, and Waters et al. (2014) claim that having a protean career orientation facilitates mobility. In summation, to take advantage of professional development that is favored by working professionals, people now set individualized goals and define success subjectively (Hall, 2004). Briscoe et al.(2012) hypothesized that people assume selfmanaged careers in order to seek fulfillment in their lives through their work, which was echoed by Hofstetter and Rosenblatt (2017). Acting in a way in which a person expresses oneself through actions and makes decisions based on internalized values is consistent with the organismic motivational theories and specifically SDT, which suggests personal growth through learning, skill development, and experiences is critical to worker motivation. In support of SDT Sheldon et al. (2003) suggested workers seek to fill their highest potential, and literature on the PCO would hypothesize the way to do that would be to engage in self-directed adaptable and versatile career management strategies in order to promote learning and personal growth. Therefore, as people harbor values that are self-directed and welcoming to mobility acting on their identified motivation will lead to outcomes like career change, because people will as Ryan and Deci (2000, 2001) suggest be engaging in behaviors that are consistent with strongly held personal beliefs and will express their values through action. The PCO is in part defined by valuing freedom to choose a career path and also defines success not by title and pay, but subjectively (an individual’s own personal satisfaction with the outcomes of decisions) in turn, this study presumes the link between attitudes and behaviors discussed by Salancik and Pfeffer (1977). As such the following hypothesis based on the idea of identified motivation through SDT is brought forward to study:

2.4. Career satisfaction It stands to reason that the level of a person's career satisfaction would play a role in professional mobility, such that when people are satisfied with their careers they will continue to manage them in a consistent way, and their attitudes will dictate future behavior. Stated differently, as Latham and Pinder (2005) claim people are motivated to reduce a discrepancy between their desired end state and their current state, as such, if they are satisfied with their careers they should continue with their current career management strategy. Contrarily the framework laid out by Latham and Pinder (2005) would suggest if a person is not satisfied with their career that individual would in turn become motivated to change course and employ a novel strategy for career progression. The goal argument of Latham and Pinder (2005) follows Scheier and Carver’s (1988) CT framework, which suggests people are motivated to become closer to the versions of the idealized self. Stated simply under the CT framework the comparator of career satisfaction would motivate people to act according to their career attitudes when they are satisfied and as their level of career satisfaction drops they would become increasingly motivated to act in an opposite way than their career attitudes would suggest. Carbery et al. (2003) observed evidence for psychological factors as playing a role in hotel management turnover; however, did not specifically test to see how or why hotel managers would change careers altogether. While empirical evidence linking satisfaction and career attitudes is scant, a longitudinal study was conducted in Switzerland with professional workers (who were not specific to any industry) the related construct of job satisfaction moderated the association between professional orientation and turnover intentions (Tschopp et al., 2013). The study found that when job satisfaction remained high over the course of a year, there was a direct relationship between a person’s professional orientation (protean or loyal) and turnover. However, when job satisfaction was lower at the second time interval, those with loyalty orientations rather than protean orientations were less likely to still have low turnover intentions. Career satisfaction – a related yet independent construct from job satisfaction – may also affect some of the same relations and is probably more salient as it relates to careerlevel variables, since career satisfaction and PCO are career-level, not job-level, variables. Consistent with Tschopp et al. (2013), if people have a low PCO and are unsatisfied with their careers, they would be more likely to seek out professional mobility, because they would be motivated to rectify their lack of satisfaction in their careers by pursuing an alternative strategy as CT would suggest and would be echoed by Latham and Pinder’s (2005) work on goal attainment. However, those who have low career

H1. The Protean Career Orientation is associated with Career Change Intentions. 2.3. Control theory Attitudes like PCO may be related to behavioral intentions like career change, however, the association may be moderated. This paper proposes attitudes do not always predict future behavioral intentions in clear ways, and is aimed to discover when patterns of behavior are broken or changed. Like the literature on SDT, the literature on Carver and Scheier’s (1982) Control Theory (CT) suggests people attempt to reduce the discrepancy between a desired end state—a defined goal—and the level of progress being made toward the established goal (Latham and Pinder, 2005). However, the mechanisms regarding how CT determines behavior differ from the way identified motivation is expected to within the SDT framework. Essentially the CT argument posits that control systems consists of four distinct parts: 1) A sensor, information gathering, such as a person’s observations and perceptions; 2) A standard, something that is achievable, like a general aspiration or a specific performance level; 3) A comparator, the way in which information is used to compare progress being made towards a goal; and 4) An effector, the mechanism that allows a person to interact with the environment and adjust effort toward a goal (Powers, 1973). Essentially, CT is a negative discrepancy model, where people are motivated to minimize the discrepancy between where they are and where they want to be (Nelson, 1993). Scheier and Carver (1988) suggest CT works as a continual feedback loop where the highest level of feedback is a person’s idealized self, and the lowest level of feedback involves specific behaviors that a person engages in. One feedback 3

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Though career variety may be obtained through involuntary means it is typically conceptualized as being driven by internal factors associated with individuals and the external structural environment in which they exist (Crossland et al., 2014). Shadish et al. (2002) suggest that career variety is a distinct non-redundant behavioral construct. Recently, career variety has been suggested as contributing to an individual’s experiential stock and the broadness of the person’s cognitive frame (Crossland et al., 2014). Career variety provides an individual with a broad experiential frame of reference that one may call upon in the workplace to help solve problems (Dragoni et al., 2011). Career variety may be reflective of certain personal characteristics, such as openness to experience, risk propensity, neuroticism, need for autonomy, locus of control, broad professional networks, and broad professional experience. However, it is not a sum of these parts, but rather a unique and distinctive construct, which explains variance these related factors do not (Crossland et al., 2014). Career variety will increase the cognitive scope of a professional due to the number of diverse situations the individual has been a part of, regardless of why the person obtained the degree of career variety in the first place. Therefore, if a person is predisposed to professional mobility or if, as Lee and Mitchell (1994) suggest, shocks (such as a company layoff or an unexpected pregnancy) to one’s personal or professional life are a reason for increased professional mobility the effect of that career variety, should be the same, which would not hold true for personality factors. Career variety may also be an effective explanatory variable for career change intentions. The Integrated Career Change Model (ICCM; Rhodes and Doering, 1983) describes the behavior of people who change their careers. In particular, the ICCM highlights the role of career progression, or the extent to which one has progressed in a career, which is another way of thinking about career variety. Specifically, the ICCM suggests that employees who have advanced to a high degree and thereby enjoy more status in their professions will be less likely to change careers. The cost of changing professions becomes higher with each instantiation of advancement within an industry, similar to the arguments of tournament theory (Lazear and Rosen, 1981). Tournament theory posits managers compete for pay based on their ranks and that they work hard to advance for the prize of a higher salary, more status, and accumulated power (Lazear and Rosen, 1981), which Rhodes and Doering’s (1983) ICCM claims would lead to less professional mobility. In the tournament framework, pay dispersion between managerial ranks is what affects turnover within an organization, because it sets up managers to be in direct competition for high stakes prizes (Lambert et al., 1993; Lazear, 1995). Tournament theory may be especially salient in a hotel management context, because managers frequently work when their supervising managers do not due to the 24h operations of hotels, and “when uncertainty and managerial discretion are high, monitoring managers becomes difficult and organizations may have to rely on relative performance evaluation and dispersed pay distributions” (Bloom & Michel, 2002 p. 40). Essentially, when managers make downward comparisons (comparing themselves to subordinates), they are more likely to remain in organizations than their counterparts who make upward comparisons (comparing themselves to superiors; Eddleston, 2009). When pay dispersion increases, status also increases and it accelerates as a person climbs up the pay structure (organizational hierarchy). Managers work to outperform each other to obtain the prize (Gomez-Mejia, 1994; Lazear, 1995). Tournament theory is based on the logic that winners stay within organizations to compete for higher prizes while losers are eliminated from further competition and are expected to engage in turnover (Lambert et al., 1993). The high stakes tournament within organizations has the potential to promote antagonistic social relationships and can reduce employee commitment (Pfeffer, 1998). Promotions under the tournament framework are tied to performance as well (Cichello et al., 2009) suggesting that organizations attempt to retain and reward their best performers. Providing some additional

satisfaction levels, but harbor a high PCO would be likely to want to remain in their positions for the long-term as an alternative strategy for managing their careers (again to reduce the discrepancy between their actual and idealized self). Alternatively, Campion et al. (1994) observed workers who were more mobile within their organizations, and were also more satisfied in their employment, harbored lower turnover intentions than those who wished to gain knowledge and skill growth through mobility outcomes, but could not. Those who were less mobile and did not have the opportunity to be professionally mobile were less satisfied, harbored higher turnover intentions, and were less committed to the organization than their more mobile counterparts. The findings of Campion et al. (1994) and Tschopp et al. (2013) indicate that satisfaction with a job moderates organizational outcomes when a person’s professional orientation is considered, which is consistent with the CT idea that people make comparisons regarding goal progress and then become motivated to change behaviors or goals to continue reducing the discrepancy between their current and their desired states. The definition of career satisfaction, according to Greenhaus et al. (1990), takes a longer time horizon into consideration than job satisfaction and therefore, it may be a stronger, more salient factor when determining how it moderates the relations between PCO and outcomes such as the intentions to change one’s career altogether. In short, the lower PCO is, the less likely an individual is to be mobile (as SDT suggests people would be motivated to act based on their identified motivation), but as satisfaction with a career decreases, the relations may change so that when those who are increasingly less protean oriented and are unsatisfied seek out professional mobility as a way to rectify their situations. Essentially this paper hypothesizes career satisfaction moderates the association because it provides comparative information to individuals regarding the current states of their careers with their idealized states. When individuals’ PCO levels are relatively high they are hypothesized to be more mobile; however as they become increasingly less satisfied with their careers they may become less interested in becoming professionally mobile, as that adaptive self-directed approach may have led to an unsatisfactory career. When people are satisfied their attitudes should be predictive of future behaviors; contrarily, when they are unsatisfied they may recognize the need to behave in a novel way in order to make progress towards their goal. Consistent with the work on CT that suggests people are motivated to reach some desired end state and will be motivated to engaged with an “effector” or a mechanism to adjust behavior in pursuit of that end state, moderated hypotheses are thus proposed: with career satisfaction acting as a comparator (proposed in this study as a moderating condition) between how a person is oriented to a career and organizational outcomes (the effector proposed in this study is career change): H2. The association between a Protean Career Orientation and Career Change Intentions is moderated by Career Satisfaction so that: H2a. As Career Satisfaction decreases the association between a Protean Career Orientation and Career Change Intentions becomes negative. H2b. As Career Satisfaction increases the association between a Protean Career Orientation and Career Change Intentions becomes positive. 2.5. Career variety Career variety is defined as, “the array of distinct professional and institutional experiences a [professional] has had” (Crossland et al., 2014, p. 652). Workers may accumulate their distinct professional and institutional experiences in voluntary or involuntary ways; for example, people may engage in mobility when not intending to do so, like after a company layoff or when receiving an unsolicited job offer (Lee and Mitchell, 1994). Conversely, people may also willfully and purposefully apply for internal company transfers or switch companies altogether. 4

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reasons explaining Kim and Brymer’s (2011) finding that ethical leadership improves hotel manager satisfaction and commitment levels, because if these high stakes decisions are being made ethically and fairly managers are more likely to accept them as justified and believe in the organizational system. Further evidence from Carbery et al. (2003) and Collins (2010) may suggest that these psychological factors are deterministic in making the decision for hotel managers to turn over, while Simons et al. (2017) and Xu et al. (2017) showed recent evidence that integrity and managerial support, respectively, reduce turnover in a hotel context. Additionally, McGinley and Martinez (2016) found an interaction effect between the personally felt variable of work-life-conflict and the anticipated ability to progress a career, where the more progression that was anticipated the less work-lifeconflict predicted hotel managerial turnover intentions. Therefore, the high stakes tournament not only influences career variety outcomes, but also the way in which the tournament is conducted may play a large role in how hotel managers perceive how they fit into the organization. While, understanding how promotion decisions are perceived is important, the ICCM and tournament theory both suggest the outcome would be the same. Just as career variety may be accumulated due to forced external factors (Lee and Mitchell, 1994) or purposefully sought after (Crossland et al., 2014) the end result will be the same. Therefore, this study focuses not on how or why career variety is accumulated in the first place, but rather focuses on what the accumulation of career variety itself predicts. Ultimately rewarding an organization’s best performers with promotions does not necessarily induce more career variety for the “winning” managers, as they may be promoted within a functional area, and will, by definition, remain within the organizational structure. Those who are not promoted, however, and who leave the organization will accumulate more career variety, even if they remain in the same functional area, because they will work within a new organizational context. Given that people who lose tournaments in the workplace are more likely to leave their organizations, they (as a group) may have accumulated more career variety over the course of their careers, and may begin to seek out mobility outcomes thus becoming more self-directed in their careers or as they are unable to move vertically in organizations easily, as Waters et al. (2014) outlines in their conceptualization of protean paths for individual careers. Alternatively, those who have not advanced as much will have invested less time into their occupations and may see more potential for advancing in other professions (since they have not advanced as much in their current careers as of yet, or have a lower opportunity cost associated with the career change decision), and will be more likely to change careers. The ICCM argues that the lack of social benefits in terms of status, material benefits in terms of pay, and the psychological positive reinforcement of climbing an industry’s ranks explain why greater degrees of career variety may be associated with a greater likelihood to change careers. An early study on career progression events found that they had an overall positive effect on the frequencies of promotions (Murrell et al., 1996). Lam et al. (2012) found that highly mobile workers, overall, had higher salaries than their counterparts who were not as mobile. Working professionals who have engaged in career mobility may therefore see lower barriers to change careers, have broader professional networks, have a more expansive experiential stock, and have received both perceived and realized benefits from being mobile. McGinley et al., (2014) observed that hotel managers often engaged in within-industry turnover before changing careers, meaning that increases in career variety were associated with career change behavior, which is consistent with the ICCM of Rhodes and Doering (1983); therefore, the following hypothesis is brought forward to study:

change intentions is moderated, so may be the association between career variety and career change intentions. Again CT may help to explain that as people are unsatisfied with the careers they will be motivated change their behaviors based on Carver and Scheier’s (1982) and Latham and Pinder’s (2005) assertions that people desire to reduce the discrepancy between their current and idealized states. If a certain type of behavior (one that lead to a large accumulation of career variety) led to high levels of career satisfaction the individual should continue engaging in a pattern of behavior that includes a high degree of professional mobility, as the person would feel their current actions are reducing any incongruences between the person’s current position and goals (Latham and Pinder, 2005). However, if behavior has led to an unsatisfactory career, the individual would be more apt to change behavior and engage in an alternative strategy—suggested here to be one that is relatively immobile as CT would posit the person would become motivated to make positive progress towards their desired end state. Therefore, this paper proposes that career satisfaction is a moderating factor that leads people to break with previously established behavioral patterns, those with low levels of career satisfaction will intend to be motivated to act differently in the future and those with high levels of career satisfaction should be motivated to act similarly in the future, the nomological network can be seen in Fig. 1. The following hypotheses are brought forward to study: H4. The association between Career Variety and Career Change Intentions is moderated by Career Satisfaction so that: H4a. As Career Satisfaction decreases the association between Career Variety and Career Change Intentions becomes negative. H4b. As Career Satisfaction increases the association Career Variety and Career Change Intentions becomes positive.

3. Methodology 3.1. Study 1 The results reported here are based on data collected from active hotel managers within the United States by means of an electronic survey. Respondents were considered qualified if they were working as a hotel manager in any capacity, in any brand, at any level at the time of the study. A total of 448 hotel managers completed the survey. Study participants were solicited through Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). A small majority (n = 254, 56%) of the sample were men. A majority of the participants had a bachelor’s degree as their highest completed level of education (n = 237, 53%) with the next highest level of completed education being an associate’s degree (n = 106, 24%). The sample was largely Caucasian (n = 308, 69%); a slight majority of participants were in a long-term committed relationship, with 169 (38%) reporting being married and 58 (13%) engaged or cohabitating. The average age of the participants was 33.2 years old (sd = 10.1). A total of 178 (40%) managers were considered entry-level based on the classification established by McGinley et al. (2014) meaning they were in positions that did not supervise other managers and did not require previous management experience be in their current role, with 270 (60%) of the sample being advanced-level managers or those who managed other managers. Finally, a total of 99 (22%) of

H3. Career Variety is associated with Career Change Intentions. 2.6. Moderated associations Fig. 1. Nomological Network.

In much the same way that the association between PCO and career 5

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the sample worked in independent hotels with 343 (77%) of participants being managers at branded properties (please note, six managers did not state the name of the hotel where they worked for classification purposes).

Table 1 PROCESS Model One Results for the PCO effect on Career Change Intentions.

Constant Career Satisfaction PCO PCO X Career Satisfaction Gender

3.2. Measurements The independent variable of PCO was measured by a seven-item scale developed by Baruch (2014), with a Cronbach α = 0.88 (e.g. I navigate my own career, mostly according to my plans). The dependent variable career change was measured by a three-item scale developed by Mowday et al. (1982) and career change intentions was found to be reliable with a Cronbach α = 0.93 (e.g. I am actively searching for an alternative to the hotel industry; modified from, I am actively searching for an alternative to my current industry). The moderating variable of career satisfaction was measured using a multi-item scale developed by Greenhaus et al. (1990). The scale for career satisfaction had five total items and no sub-scales and had a Cronbach α = 0.92 (e.g. I am satisfied with the success I have achieved in my career). Because men and women are known to have different career opportunities, especially in hospitality (Blayney and Blotnick, 2010) and that PCO is hypothesized to be more salient for women than men (McGinley, 2015) gender was used as a control variable. In addition to the scales being reliable, the data were found to be valid. The result of the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy was 0.91 with a p-value < .01. After conducting an EFA with an oblique rotation three factors loaded with Eigen values above 1 and accounted for 70.83% of the variance. Each of the three variables loaded on its own factor and the square of the average of the components was higher than the R2 of the correlations, as presented in the, suggesting strong convergent and discriminant validity.

b

se

t-value

LLCI

ULCI

7.25 −1.22 −0.54 0.23 0.20

0.47 0.14 0.18 0.05 0.14

16.38 −8.54 −3.04 5.08 1.42

6.33 −1.50 −0.90 0.14 −0.08

8.18 −0.94 −0.19 0.32 0.48

significant; providing a range of significance (Johnson and Fay, 1950). When there is no theoretically important values (focal values) specified a priori for the moderating variable floodlight analysis is particularly effective (Spiller et al., 2013). When the perceived level of career satisfaction is at the 1.22 level or lower there was a negative association between PCO and career change intentions, which was in support of H2a, and that significant association explained the results for 13% of the study’s sample. Conversely when the perceived level of career satisfaction is at the 3.15 level or higher there was a positive association between PCO and career change intentions, which was in support of H2b, and that significant association explained the results for 64% of the sample. In total the interaction effect significantly explained the variance for roughly half of the sample. Looking at the confidence intervals outlined in Table 2 no significant association between PCO and career change intentions was detected when career satisfaction was between 1.22 and 3.15. Finally, to further clarify the interaction effect, the interaction was plotted using the quantile function in PROCESS. The follow-up analysis was run for graphing purposes and is represented as Fig. 2.

3.3. Data analysis

5. Study 2

Hypotheses 1 and 2 were tested using PROCESS macro from Hayes (2013). PROCESS is a regression-based analysis technique, which provides a 95% bias-corrected confidence interval that can test for direct and indirect effects. Single moderation was proposed in each of the hypotheses; therefore, Model One was used for the analysis. The independent variable was PCO, while the moderating variable was career satisfaction, and career change intentions served as the dependent variable.

The sample was gathered using a purposive sampling technique in which “the investigator relies on expert judgment to select units that are ‘representative’ or ‘typical’ of a population” (Singleton & Straits, 2010, p.173). A total of 111 hotel managers completed the survey. Study participants were solicited through various professional organizations (Fairmont Hotel Alumni, the American Hotel and Lodging Association [AH&LA], Tourism Cares, Hilton Hotel Alumni, Luxury Hoteliers Worldwide, and Hotel Managers International). These professional organizations and networks were approached with a request for participation and consented to have a brief message and a link to the survey posted on the LinkedIn group page of the organization. Two weeks after the initial posting, follow-up messages were posted to the groups’ pages. In addition to these professional organizations, alumni from two schools of hospitality management, one in the Northeastern

4. Results The first hypothesis posited an association between PCO and career change intentions, and H2 claimed the association would be moderated by career satisfaction, so when career satisfaction decreases there will be a negative association with career change intentions (H2a) and when career satisfaction increases there will be a positive association with career change intentions (H2b). A significant association was observed between PCO and career change intentions (b = − 0.54, p < .01, CI: −0.90—−0.19), supporting H1. A significant interaction effect was also observed (b = 0.23, p < .01, CI: 0.14—0.32). A negative effect between PCO and career change intentions was observed as career satisfaction decreased, providing support for H2a, and a positive effect between PCO and career change intentions was observed as career satisfaction increased; therefore H2b was also supported. The results of the PROCESS Model One regression model with career change intentions as the dependent variable are shown in Table 1. The Johnson-Neyman technique (Johnson and Fay, 1950) was run (floodlight analysis) in order to further probe the interaction effect and to determine at what levels the interaction became significant at the p = .05 level. The Johnson-Neyman technique is particularly powerful when a continuous moderating variable is present as it identifies where an association begins to have a significant effect within a model, which allows the researcher to test at what point moderated relations become

Table 2 Conditional effects of PCO on Career Change Intentions at levels of Career Satisfaction. Career Satisfaction

Effect

se

LLCI

ULCI

1.00 1.22a 1.60 2.20 2.80 3.15b 3.40 4.00 4.60 5.20 5.80 6.40 7.00

−0.31 −0.26 −0.18 −0.04 0.10 0.18 0.24 0.38 0.51 0.65 0.79 0.93 1.07

0.14 0.13 0.12 0.11 0.10 0.09 0.09 0.10 0.11 0.12 0.14 0.16 0.19

−0.59 −0.53 −0.44 −0.25 −0.09 0.00 0.06 0.19 0.30 0.41 0.51 0.61 0.70

−0.04 0.00 0.06 0.17 0.29 0.36 0.42 0.56 0.72 0.89 1.07 1.25 1.43

a b

6

13.39% of the sample is at or below the Career Satisfaction level of 1.22. 64.06% of the sample is at or above the Career Satisfaction level of 3.15.

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experience needed to be considered as contributing towards career variety, so that each distinct nation-state in which a manager had worked was coded separately as well (note: at the time of the survey all participants were currently working in the United States). In summation, career variety was calculated using the following equation from Crossland et al. (2014):

Total Number of Distinct Professional Experiences Total Years of Professional Experience For example, an individual who had worked in the United States for ten years and had held three positions: assistant front office manager at a JW Marriot, a housekeeping manager at a Residence Inn, and a human resources manager at a Hyatt Regency would have a numerator of ten, because the person worked in one country (1), for two companies (2), for three brands (3), in three different functional areas (3), all in the hotel industry (1). In this example the person also had ten years of professional managerial experience, leading to a career variety score of one. The principal investigator and a graduate student coded the values and reached a Cohen’s k = 0.82, indicating a high degree of inter-rater reliability. The dependent variable of career change was measured by the same three-item scale developed by Mowday et al. (1982) and career change intentions was also found to be reliable with a Cronbach α = 0.91. The moderating variable of career satisfaction was measured using the same multi-item scale developed by Greenhaus et al. (1990) and had a Cronbach α = 0.92. In addition to the scales being reliable, the data were found to be valid. The result of the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy was 0.85 with a p-value < .01. After conducting an EFA with an oblique rotation three factors loaded with Eigen values above 1 and accounted for 84.19% of the variance. Each of the three variables loaded on its own factor and the square of the average of the components was higher than the R2 of the correlations, as presented in the, suggesting strong convergent and discriminant validity.

Fig. 2. Moderated Relations Between PCO and Career Change Intentions.

U.S. and one in the Southeastern U.S. were selected because they were somewhat representative of the broader population of hospitality programs in the U.S. were also solicited for participation in the survey. A small majority (n = 57, 51%) of the respondents in the sample were women. A large majority of the respondents had obtained a bachelor’s degree as the highest level of completed education (n = 86, 77%), with the next highest level of completed education being an associate degree (n = 8, 7%). The sample was largely Caucasian (n = 84, 76%); most participants were in a long-term committed relationship, with 54 (49%) reporting being married and 12 (11%) engaged or cohabitating. The average age of the participants was 35.7 years (sd = 9.5). A total of 28 participants (25%) worked in independent hotels with the remaining (n = 83, 75%) working at branded hotels. A total of 50 participants (45%) were classified as entry-level managers based on McGinley et al. (2014), with the remaining (n = 61, 55%) being advanced-level managers. 5.1. Measurements

5.2. Data analysis The independent variable of career variety was measured using Crossland et al. (2014) as a guiding framework. The study summed the distinct number of functional areas, organizations, and industries (as defined by the three-digit NAICS codes) in which participants had worked divided by the total years spent in a professional management capacity as its measure of career variety. Years of professional employment were counted as the number of years of working full-time after completion of the highest level of education, as outlined by Crossland et al. (2014). In order to do this, the surveys also collected the work histories of the hotel managers; participants were given the option of uploading their resumes as an attachment to the survey or manually filling in their professional work experiences at the end of the surveys. Professional experience was coded for distinct organizational affiliation (e.g., if respondents had worked for Marriott twice in their careers, Marriott would only be counted once). Experience was also coded for distinct functional area affiliation and the study verified that each functional area was counted only once. As the career variety score came closer to zero, an individual would have less career variety; alternatively, a higher score equated to a higher degree of career variety. A panel of experts consisting of professors of hospitality management at various universities and human resource managers in hotels was asked to confirm the functional areas. The panelists were of the opinion that functional areas were deemed to be distinct as they were broken down into separate operating departments, within the hotel operational system (e.g., front office was coded as separate from housekeeping). The panel of experts also suggested that distinct brand affiliations should be coded separately, in addition to distinct organizational affiliations, because certain elements of organizational processes and culture would remain across brands within an organization, and that movement between organizations would increase the experiential stock of managers. Finally, the panel suggested that international

The hypotheses tested in Study 2 again proposed single moderated relations, and as such were also tested by using Model One of the PROCESS macro from Hayes (2013). The independent variable used was career variety, and like Study 1, career satisfaction served as the moderating variable, and career change intentions was used as the dependent variable with gender serving as a control variable. 6. Results The third hypothesis posited a significant association between career variety and career change intentions, and H4 stated that association would be moderated by career satisfaction so that, when career satisfaction decreases there will be a negative association with career change intentions (H4a) and when career satisfaction increases there will be a positive association with career change intentions (H4b). A significant association was observed between career variety and career change intentions (b = −2.56, p < .01, CI: −4.19—−0.94), supporting H3. A significant interaction effect was observed (b = 0.50, p < .01, CI: 0.21— 0.78). A negative effect between career variety and career change intentions was observed as career satisfaction decreased, providing support for H4a, and a positive effect between career variety and career change intentions was observed as career satisfaction increased; therefore H4b was also supported. The results of the PROCESS Model One regression model with career change intentions as the dependent variable are shown in Table 3. To determine at what point the interaction effect is significant a Floodlight analysis was run to test H4. When the perceived level of career satisfaction is at the 4.00 level or lower there was a negative association between career variety and career change intentions, which was in support of H4a, and that significant association explained the 7

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variety were more likely to harbor career change intentions when satisfied with the careers suggesting they continue to desire a self-directed, highly mobile career, where they focus on new experiences for learning and skill growth. However, when they were not satisfied with their careers they were more likely to not harbor career change intentions and alter the way in which their careers progress by remaining in the hotel industry. Interestingly, a low level of career satisfaction had the opposite effect on those who had relatively low levels of PCO and a relatively low degree of accumulated career variety. For these individuals they reported being willing to break character by harboring career change intentions and leaving the hotel industry, while their satisfied counterparts were more likely to intend to remain as hotel managers. For the population of managers who are satisfied with their careers they are more likely to change careers because being adaptable and versatile by having followed a protean career path or harboring protean career attitudes have been successful. The results of this study indicate career attitudes and previous career behaviors can be used to predict future career related outcomes for hotel managers. However, the results are qualified by an interaction with how satisfied individuals are with their careers overall. The results provide evidence suggesting the reason some managers exit the hotel industry is because of a combination of their attitudes and satisfaction with their careers so that when they are not satisfied with their careers they will intend to behave in a manner inconsistent with their attitudes. The result for the second study where previous behaviors was used rather than career attitudes, the observations echoed that of the first study in that people would intend to behave differently than they had previously if they were not satisfied with their careers. As such the two studies discussed in this paper help to answer why hotel managers engage in turnover; simply put when not satisfied people will seek out novel behavioral outcomes that are inconsistent with their attitudes and previous behaviors.

Table 3 PROCESS Model One Results for the Career Variety Effect on Career Change Intentions.

Constant Career Satisfaction Career Variety Career Variety X Career Satisfaction Gender

B

se

t-value

LLCI

ULCI

10.81 −1.49 −2.56 0.50 0.04

1.72 0.29 0.82 0.14 0.30

6.29 −5.18 −3.13 3.49 0.12

7.40 −2.06 −4.19 0.21 −0.57

14.22 −0.92 −0.94 0.78 0.64

Table 4 Conditional effects of Career Variety on Career Change Intentions at levels of Career Satisfaction. Career Satisfaction

Effect

Se

LLCI

ULCI

1.00 1.60 2.20 2.80 3.40 4.00a 4.60 5.20 5.80 5.84b 6.40 7.00

−2.06 −1.76 −1.47 −1.17 −0.87 −0.57 −0.27 0.03 0.33 0.35 0.63 0.93

0.68 0.60 0.56 0.44 0.36 0.29 0.22 0.18 0.17 0.18 0.21 0.26

−3.34 −2.95 −2.49 −2.03 −1.58 −1.15 −0.72 −0.33 −0.02 0.00 0.22 0.40

−0.71 −0.58 −0.44 −0.30 −0.23 0.00 0.18 0.39 0.67 0.70 1.03 1.45

a b

6.42% of the sample is at or below the Career Satisfaction level of 4.00. 53.21% of the sample is at or above the Career Satisfaction level of 5.84.

results for 6% of the study’s sample. Conversely when the perceived level of career satisfaction is at the 5.84 level or higher there was a positive association between career variety and career change intentions, which was in support of H4b, and that significant association explained the results for 53% of the sample. The significant interaction effect explained variance for roughly 59% of the total sample. Looking at the confidence intervals outlined in Table 4 no significant association between career variety and career change intentions was detected when career satisfaction was between 4.00 and 5.84. Finally, to further clarify the interaction effect, the interaction was plotted using the quantile function in PROCESS. The follow-up analysis was run for graphing purposes and is represented as Fig. 3.

7.1. Theoretical implications One important result of this study is that the direct measurement of PCO developed by Baruch (2014) and the measure of career variety developed by Crossland et al. (2014) were similarly associated with career change intentions. This is important because Baruch (2014) observed poor measurements of PCO in the extant literature and called for not only more scale development, but also for ways in which to directly observe PCO. While career variety is an independent and distinct construct, the behaviors that lead to acquiring career variety are the same behaviors expected of someone with a high degree of PCO, thereby making the similar results important for understanding how the two constructs can be used to understand future behavioral outcomes and intentions. It could be argued that career variety is a way to measure a professional’s protean career path, which Waters et al. (2014) suggests is equally important to determining meaningful workplace outcomes as is a person’s career orientation. Secondly, as another answer to Baruch (2014) moderated relations were proposed and observed between workers’ PCO and organizationally relevant outcome variables. The Control Theory framework of Carver and Scheier (1982) was used as a theoretical framework and explains why some managers with a relatively high protean attitude and with relatively high career variety are actually less likely to harbor career change intentions. As such the CT also explains why people who have not been as professionally mobile or who hold relatively lower protean attitudes are more likely to harbor career change indentions. The moderated relations observed in this study help to explain why past behavior and career attitudes have not been the best direct predictors of future career outcome variables Baruch (2014). In fact the results observed in this study actually show evidence for why harboring a PCO may actually result in less professional mobility, which is the opposite of what is expected from Hall’s (2004) initial conceptualization of the construct. As well, when career satisfaction levels were low the results

7. Discussion Both studies suggested career change decisions for hotel managers are in some ways determined by the circumstances of their careers. Those with a relatively high PCO or a relatively high degree of career

Fig. 3. Moderated Relations Between Career Variety and Career Change Intentions. 8

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growth, and new challenges, rather than focusing on pay, titles, and how positions may act as stepping stones to future advancement. By allowing an at-risk person to choose the direction of career progression the company would be more likely to not only retain that individual, but would also build a more adaptive and versatile team capable of completing various tasks. These meetings could take place one-on-one with a superior or even in company-wide internal career fares where managers would have the ability to meet, network, and learn about new opportunities within the company and thus discover new paths for themselves. These events would as CT suggests give managers an opportunity to gather information, compare where they are against their goal attainment, and take steps to reduce the discrepancy or alternatively adjust their goals with new opportunities in mind, and doing so all while remaining within their organization. Additionally, with the goal of retaining quality managers in the industry, companies may even act collaboratively to prevent or reduce career change. Career change unlike turnover hurts all industry members, because if a manager moves from one company to another one organization loses and the other gains; however, if a manager leaves the industry one company loses a resource and no other companies gain from that movement. Therefore, companies may act together to create industry-wide conditions that allow for movement. Sports teams regularly trade-players and even on some rare occasions coaches, hotel managers may seek out similar opportunities for their managerial staff. A market-wide hiring pool could be created where candidates can join of their own accord and when an opportunity presents itself apply to swap positions with a manager from another company, similar to an exchange program. This way both companies gain from the exchange and can set the terms for the movement (interviews, background checks, and the timeline for the move). Inter-company transfers could be achieved and would reduce the costs associated with turnover and would eliminate the deleterious effects on the industry that are created by career change. Finally, managers of hotel companies should be aware the conditions of a person’s current employment might not fully explain their decision to change careers. Many employee satisfaction surveys fall short of taking a comprehensive career-long approach to gathering information. While information like job satisfaction and other job-related variables are important for companies to understand, the results of this study suggest they do not tell the full story. Incorporating some careerlevel variables and information regarding career attitudes should help hotel companies better identify those who are at-risk for quitting the organization and therefore allow time for intervening measures to be employed.

suggested that people who hold low PCO attitudes may actually become more mobile, which explains why Baruch (2014) observed that PCO is not the best direct predictor of professional mobility. While significant main effect results were reported on in this paper, the moderated associations explain in greater detail the complicated decision hotel managers go through when changing their careers. McGinley et al. (2014) reported on hotel managers struggling with the decision to leave the hotel industry, and did so only after looking toward the future and seeing undesirable outcomes. In this study hotel managers looked to their past and compared what they did with current levels of satisfaction, which in turn, helped to determine career change intentions. It may be that not only are future perceptions of a career important (McGinley et al., 2014), but also as this study suggests so too are what has happened previously in a hotel manager’s career. By investigating variables that are independent of the current workplace (career variety and career satisfaction by definition account for more than the conditions of a worker’s current employer) this study expands our understanding of the career change phenomenon beyond the work of Rhodes and Doering’s (1983) ICCM and echo McGinley et al’s (2014) assertion that hotel managers look beyond the confines and experiences at any one job when making the decision to leave the hotel industry. In the case of this paper, hotel managers looked to their pasts and considered their overall level of career satisfaction to help determine how open they were to career change. Therefore, unlike established models for professional mobility like the ICCM of Rhodes and Doering (1983) or the Unfolding Model of Lee and Mitchell (1994) which consider what is happening to an individual at a given moment in time or at a current job, this study extends the decision to change careers to jobs that were held previously bringing a career-level rather than job-level perspective to the literature. 7.2. Practical applications Hotel managers may also use the results of this study to aid in increasing retention within their organizations. Career change is a type of turnover that may be particularly difficult for the industry to overcome, because when a trained and qualified manager leaves hotel work altogether, it creates a challenge for replacing that individual. Understanding who and under what conditions managers are more likely to exit hotel work should be valuable for helping to keep hotel managers in the hotel industry. For example, hotel managers could put programs into place for alternative career progression strategies. For people who are looking to take non-traditional steps with their careers, as would partly be evidenced by harboring career change intentions, managers could promote horizontal career moves into departments outside of a typical hotel management career progression paths like having a director of front office work in human resources, a housekeeping manager transferring to a food and beverage position, or even exploring ways for hotel managers to move into different operating theaters like a manager from a company’s lifestyle brand transferring to a large convention hotel or vice versa. The aim of these moves is to satisfy the desire for continued growth and learning opportunities and to allow managers to create a greater sense of self-direction in their careers. In order to retain the element of self-direction managers who seek to increase company retention would need to have conversations and pitch non-traditional avenues for career progression. One way in which to include these conversations beyond the annual performance evaluation is to have bi-annual check-in meetings where managers meet to discuss company-wide employment alternatives focusing on learning,

7.3. Limitations and future studies The data for Study 1 were collected at a single point in time with a survey, which may lead to problems with common method bias. The data collection effort used various techniques to reduce or eliminate the problem as outlined by Podsakoff et al. (2003). The techniques employed were to keep the survey under 10 min in length to minimize the potential effects of transient moods, and in order to prevent survey fatigue the respondents answered questions on different scale types (Likert and semantic differential scales). Additionally, Study 2 collected data, where the independent variable, by definition happened at a point in time before the moderating and dependent variables, and was collected at the end of the survey as to not influence any results. The variables and data collection technique in Study 2 established the independent variable as occurring, in a temporal sense, before the

9

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which were tested. The aim of this study was to explain variance that was resultant of neo-career attitudes and their role in hotel managers’ career change in intentions, while also testing to see if previous behavior based on those attitudes would explain the phenomenon in the same way. However, the general discussion of career change would be expected to be influenced by several other factors like personal characteristics and beliefs, organizational characteristics, industrial conditions, and individual motivations, which are beyond the scope of the current study. As such future researchers could conduct additional field surveys which aim to further advance the scholarly conversation by testing and investigating a broader set of variables, focusing on individual, organizational, and industrial level factors. Finally, this paper used career satisfaction as a moderating variable. While significant relations were observed supporting this study’s hypotheses, the results may not be comprehensive. Additional studies should examine career satisfaction’s effects on additional outcome variables and how it may moderate other associations that were beyond the scope of this study. For instance future studies could investigate the effect career satisfaction has on organizational rather than industrial level turn over, or the level of organization or career commitment levels.

dependent variable, thereby designing away problems with common method bias. Additionally, the results of Study 1 and Study 2 mirror each other further suggesting that common method bias were not responsible for explaining the observed results. To build on the results of this paper, future studies could look at organizations that are undergoing change and thereby creating natural experiments in the field. These natural or quasi-experimental studies would afford a greater degree of control, making stronger causal inferences to discuss in the literature regarding career change. Additionally, future studies could examine industrial effects by comparing hotel managers to workers in other more stable fields. The results of this study are limited to hotel managers, therefore comparing results against those in public service, the medical field, or even other service related fields like the retail industry would make for interesting results that were beyond the current studies’ scopes. In addition to survey research not providing causal inferences survey research by nature cannot test for every potential variable that explains variance regarding the phenomenon of interest (Singleton and Straits, 2010). While survey research does provide a strong degree of contextual realism, or the strength and nature of the association as it occurs in the field, all survey research is confined to the specific factors, Appendix A See Tables A1–A4. Table A1 Construct validity tables. (Study 1) Component 1 PCO Item 1 PCO Item 2 PCO Item 3 PCO Item 4 PCO Item 5 PCO Item 6 PCO Item 7 CSAT Item 1 CSAT Item 2 CSAT Item 3 CSAT Item 4 CSAT Item 5 CCI Item 1 CCI Item 2 CCI Item 3

2

3

0.63 0.71 0.51 0.76 0.80 0.71 0.63 0.80 0.82 0.78 0.80 0.81 0.83 0.80 0.81

AVE for Protean Career Orientation is 0.68, AVE for Career Satisfaction is 0.80, AVE for Career Change Intentions is 0.81.

Table A2 Component Correlation Matrix Study 1. Component

M

SD

Protean Career Orientation

Career Satisfaction

Career Change Intentions

Protean Career Orientation Career Satisfaction Career Change Intentions

2.75 2.81 4.63

1.07 1.31 1.67

1.00 0.65** −0.18**

1.00 −0.35**

1.00

** =Correlations significant at the p-value < .01 level (two-tailed significance test).

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Table A3 Construct validity tables. (Study 2). Component 1 Career Variety CSAT Item 1 CSAT Item 2 CSAT Item 3 CSAT Item 4 CSAT Item 5 CCI Item 1 CCI Item 2 CCI Item 3

2

3

0.95 0.85 0.88 0.70 0.88 0.78 0.68 0.67 0.83

AVE for Career Variety is 0.95, AVE for Career Satisfaction is 0.82, AVE for Career Change Intentions is 0.81. Table A4 Component Correlation Matrix Study 2. Component

M

SD

Career Variety

Career Satisfaction

Career Change Intentions

Career Variety Career Satisfaction Career Change Intentions

1.42 5.57 2.81

0.96 1.11 1.91

1.00 −0.11 0.15

1.00 −0.36**

1.00

** =Correlations significant at the p-value < .01 level (two-tailed significance test).

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