Understanding the dynamic relationship between career plateauing, organizational affective commitment and citizenship behavior

Abstract

The research has long assumed that the perception of career plateauing triggers negative affective and behavioral reactions (i.e., normal effect perspective), and that the models hold at the between-person and within-person levels. However, some scholars suggest that the affective and behavioral engagement of employees may also affect their career experiences (i.e., reverse relationship perspective), and caution us not to infer homology across levels. To test these competing perspectives, we analyzed 1227 observations from three longitudinal survey waves conducted over 42 months with 409 employees of a Canadian financial/insurance company. The results indicate that higher than usual occasion reports of content plateauing were related to decreased affective commitment and OCB, while hierarchical plateauing perceptions were only negatively related at the between-level to affective commitment. This study found support for an inverse association between OCB and content plateauing, such that lower than usual reports of OCB were related to increased perceptions of content plateauing (reverse relationship perspective). Across times, OCB was found to be a more proximal predictor of content plateauing than affective commitment. This study contributes to the literature on career plateauing by demonstrating the dynamic nature of content plateauing perceptions and the limited role of hierarchical plateauing when the role of content plateau and time is considered.