A Meta-Analysis of the Antecedents of Career Commitment

Abstract

Career commitment refers to one’s emotional attachment to one’s career rather than to one’s current working organization. While career commitment has been studied for decades as an important construct in applied psychology research, robust conclusions about its antecedents have not been drawn by empirical research. To address this issue, this research presents the results of a meta-analytic review of the antecedents of career commitment based on data from 156 individual studies (N = 58,651) conducted between 1980 and 2019. A total of 52 latent antecedents were captured and categorized into five different groups, and the strength, direction and heterogeneity of the relations between career commitment and its antecedents were meta-analytically investigated. Our findings revealed that while individual attributes (e.g. age) alone were weak predictors of career commitment, psychological (e.g. job satisfaction) and organizational factors (e.g. organizational career growth) exhibited medium effect sizes. In addition, among job-related factors, autonomy demonstrated a relatively strong influence on career commitment. The implications are elucidated for researchers and practitioners in the light of these key findings.

Making a Commitment to Your Future: Investigating the Effect of Career Exploration and Career Decision-Making Self-Efficacy on the Relationship between Career Concern and Career Commitment

“…Due to the longitudinal nature of careers, career commitment would seem to be crucial for an individual's sustainable career development process [19]. Career commitment is a psychological link between people and their occupation, based on their affective reaction to it [20]; it refers to individuals' dedication to their career, profession, or job and has been studied for nearly four decades [21].…”

Validity of the career embeddedness scale as predictor of affective commitment

“…the deep-seated situatedness of the career in an organisation) and affective commitment (i.e. individuals' emotional attachment to and identification with the organisation) have come under scrutiny amidst contemporary changing work conditions (Akkermans, Richardson, & Kraimer, 2020;Cho, 2020;Ferreira & Coetzee, 2020;Meyer & Allen, 1991;Zhu, Kim, Milne, & Park, 2021). The pandemic has revived individuals' career agency and self-regulation in fulfilling their career goals amidst the uncertainty of changing job markets; individuals appear to have become more committed towards the management of their careers rather than being committed to the companies for which they work (Restubog, Ocampo, & Wang, 2020).…”

“…The pandemic has revived individuals' career agency and self-regulation in fulfilling their career goals amidst the uncertainty of changing job markets; individuals appear to have become more committed towards the management of their careers rather than being committed to the companies for which they work (Restubog, Ocampo, & Wang, 2020). In times when organisations can no longer offer long-term job security and employment (Restubog et al, 2020;Zhu et al, 2021), the question now arises to what extent does individuals' restored need for taking control for the fulfilment of career needs influence their affective commitment towards the organisation? In times of rapid change, organisations have a dire need for workers who remain psychologically attached and committed to their work for optimal sustainable organisational performance and survival (Coetzee & Bester, 2021;Sungu, Weng, & Kitule, 2019).…”

Consequences of employee personality in the hospitality context: a systematic review and meta-analysis

“…According to Eby et al (2013), when a credibility interval is small and excludes zero, it reflects the likelihood of unexamined systematic discrepancies among the samples. Similarly, if a Q-statistic is significant, it also indicates that moderators are operating in the correlation (Zhu et al, 2020).…”