Are “job hoppers” trapped in hedonic treadmills? Effects of career orientations on newcomers' attitude trajectories

Abstract

SummaryJoining a new organization to change jobs is an influential event in an employee's career. Thus, inter‐organizational job changes have sparked growing scholarly interest, especially in the temporal dynamics involved in detaching from organizations and adapting to new ones. While it is widely accepted that employees adapt differently to job changes, the influence of employees' career orientations on changes in job attitudes has not yet been considered. This is surprising given that a key difference between self‐centered and organization‐centered career orientations is a positive attitude toward job changes. Building on hedonic adaptation, we examined how career orientations influence changes in job satisfaction and turnover intention throughout a job change. We compared self‐centered and organization‐centered employees using random coefficient modeling on two longitudinal data sets with voluntary job changers. Our results illustrate that self‐centered career orientations foster a stronger decline in job satisfaction with the new employer, as well as a larger increase in turnover intention, than organization‐centered career orientations. In contrast, employees with organization‐centered career orientations experienced an upward trend in job satisfaction toward the end of the first year. Our findings offer important implications for research on the determinants of job attitude trajectories when individuals join a new organization.