Transformational Leadership, Career Adaptability, and Work Behaviors: The Moderating Role of Task Variety.

Yujuan Lan,Zhixia Chen

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02922

Abstract

Career adaptability is a set of individual resources that benefit one’s sustainable development in his/her lifelong careers, especially in today’s turbulent environment. However, how to foster employees’ career adaptability through managerial strategies and eventually contribute to organizations remains to be studied. Guided by the career construction theory, we posit a moderated mediation model that transformational leadership (TFL) could strengthen employees’ career adaptability and further foster their task performance and organization-directed citizenship behavior (OCBO), with task variety moderating the mediation effect. We conducted a three-wave survey with 558 supervisor-employee dyads to test the overall model. The results validated that career adaptability mediated the links between TFL and task performance as well as OCBO. Furthermore, the mediation effect was stronger for employees who had higher levels of task variety. In short, our study offers the groundwork to understand that employees’ career adaptability can be activated by transformational leaders and is self-regulatory to benefit work behaviors in the task variety context. It enlightens organizations to cultivate employees’ career adaptability in the way of TFL and job design, with the objective of promoting the sustainable development for both the employees and the organizations.

Highlights

Past decades have witnessed tremendous changes in the nature of careers (Lee et al, 2018)
Among all the leadership styles, transformational leadership (TFL) has been proven to effectively influence employees’ psychological resources and eventually boost performances in the changing work environment (Ng, 2017); we propose that TFL could be one of the possible antecedents of employees’ career adaptability and further improve their job performance
The purpose of this study is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the influence of TFL on employees’ career adaptability and work behaviors, with a boundary condition of task variety

Summary

Introduction

Past decades have witnessed tremendous changes in the nature of careers (Lee et al, 2018). There still exist a great number of enterprises where employees engage in monotonous jobs, adopt simple skills, and have limited career development Most of these employees are neither prepared for career changes nor creating values for organizations, making the enterprises brittle in response to the turbulent environment. Given these trends, both scholars and practitioners prioritize to develop employees’ career adaptability, which is defined as “a psychosocial construct that denotes an individual’s resources for coping with current and imminent vocational development tasks, occupational transitions and personal traumas in their occupational roles that, to a certain extent, alter their social integration” (Savickas, 2005, 2013). Scholars have established robust links between employees’ career adaptability and favorable outcomes, such as work engagement

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