The Importance of Project Status for Career Success

Abstract

In a project-based organization, working on “hotshot” projects is often thought to contribute to employees’ career success. In this study, we investigate the effect the imputed status of the projects that employees are assigned to has on their career success. We develop a network-based model and deduce hypotheses about how highly central (high-status) projects will positively contribute to employees’ career success. We test these hypotheses on a population of 1000 IT specialists in a large international consulting firm over a five-year period. Our findings indicate that employees who are assigned, on average, to higher-status projects are within six months rewarded with higher billing rates, a major indicator of career success. We further confirm that this career advantage is moderated by two critical contextual variables: the extent of “cue consistency” of projects’ statuses and employees’ formal level. As predicted, the relationship between project status and career success is strongest if the statuses of the set of projects an employee is assigned to are consistent. Also, senior-level employees, due to their higher visibility in the organization, benefit more from higher-status assignments than do junior-level employees. Finally, we develop a novel theory that addresses how all of these factors might combine to give junior-level employees a differential advantage in their career development. Consistent with our proposed theory, we find for senior-level employees, cue consistency does very little to enhance the effect of average project status on career success. Conversely, junior-level employees heavily depend on cue consistency to benefit from averagely high-status assignments.