Career Characteristics and Career Resilience

Career resilience can be defined as the willingness and ability to adapt to new situations, to overcome adverse career impacts, and to bounce back after the career change (e.g., Luthans, Vogelgesang, & Lester, 2006; Seibert, Kraimer, & Heslin, 2016; Vough & Barker Caza, 2017). Resilience is assumed to be a set of constructive behaviours, scripts of responses and an ability to cope with a setback, a transition, or adversity (1), to be a catalyst or translate this stock of behaviours and attitudes into a strategy and to reobtain equilibrium (2), and to grow through an adaptive process (3) (Britt et al., 2016; Mishra & McDonald, 2017). Resilience for employees grows from the characteristics of adversities: frequency, intensity, and duration (Britt et al., 2016), this builds into a process of resilience which results in functional adaptation of employees. Consequently, we present an empirical longitudinal study on the process of growth and development of career resilience: the impact of the career characteristics (frequency of transitions, intensity of transition, and duration of employment) on career resilience and the effect of career resilience on career self-management over time. We tested our hypotheses with a sample of 1238 employees through structural equation modelling with the Lavaan package in R (Rosseel, 2012). We found that the number of (previous) employers and the intensity of the last transition had a positive effect on career resilience, and duration of employment had a negative effect on career resilience. Career resilience had a positive effect on individual career self-management in terms of networking, practical things, and drawing attention, over time. No causal effect was found of career resilience on mobility oriented behavior, however, we found a negative effect of frequency of transitions and duration of employment and a positive effect of magnitude of change on mobility oriented behaviour. The results showed support for the positive process related to career resilience which can imply that resilience can grow as a result of career characteristics, but that long term tenure can imply a ‘locked-in’ phenomenon which hampers career resilience.