Mentoring, Career Plateau Tendencies, Turnover Intentions And Implications For Narrowing Pay And Position Gaps Due To Gender Structural Equations Modeling

Abstract

This study analyzed responses to career-related questions from a survey of experienced Canadian Certified Management Accountants (CMAs), relative experts in the field of management accounting, to address how mentoring affects turnover intentions and career plateau tendency of male and female accounting professionals in industry. In this regard, we used structural equations modeling to build and test a framework illustrating the impact of mentoring and career-related factors. Results indicate that fostering a mentoring environment within an organization can strengthen CMAs perceptions of their careers and employers. Mentoring has also been suggested to enhance womens opportunities to advance in organizations and help women break the glass ceiling. Analyses of data relating to compensation in 2007 and 2009 for a sample of female and male CEOs and operating performance of companies led by these CEOs for these years indicate that, that compensation gaps due to gender appear to be narrowing at the top management level.

How career plateau beliefs and leader interpersonal unfairness harm job performance in dysfunctional organizational settings

“…With this study, we seek to make several contributions. First, we leverage social exchange theory to investigate how employees' perceptions of organizational politics might lead to poorer job performance, due to their beliefs about constrained opportunities for further career development (Foster et al, 2011;Tremblay et al, 1995). Such career plateau beliefs may function as important outcomes of employees' perceptions that their employer has not met its exchange obligations toward them, because it endorses a self-serving culture of favouritism (Blau, 1964;Chang et al, 2009;Kacmar & Baron, 1999).…”

“…In turn, these beliefs may reduce employees' propensity to allocate their personal energy to performance-enhancing activities, as a form of retaliation (Blau, 1964;Chang et al, 2012;Nachbagauer & Riedl, 2002). The sense that they have reached a career plateau-a pertinent organizational concern that surprisingly has received relatively little research attention (Conner, 2014;Foster et al, 2011;Lin et al, 2018)-represents an understudied mechanism by which employees' perceptions of organizational politics may thwart their performance.…”

“…Employees who are convinced that their organizational climate is marked by egoism and self-serving behaviours may in turn develop negative feelings about their career situation, because they believe that their employer does not meet its exchange obligations (Blau, 1964;Hsiung, Lin, & Lin, 2012). In this scenario, employees sense that their work efforts are not fully appreciated and accordingly may express frustration or claim that insufficient opportunities exist to advance their career with the organization (Foster et al, 2011;Tremblay & Roger, 1993). That is, because they believe dysfunctional organizational politics undermine the quality of their current and future organizational functioning, stemming from their sense that rewards are based on favouritism instead of merit (Chang et al, 2012), employees may develop negative perceptions about their career and form beliefs that their career advancement is not sufficiently supported (Cao et al, 2014).…”

“…That is, frustration with self-serving tendencies in organizational decisionmaking processes may grow stronger, to the extent that employees lack supportive exchange relationships with their organizational leaders (Yang et al, 2013). Formally, we propose that employees' exposure to leader interpersonal unfairness functions as a catalyst of their beliefs about the presence of a career plateau (Chao, 1990;Foster et al, 2011), which arise from their perceptions of organizational politics, and that it in turn diminishes the likelihood that they are willing to devote significant energy to performance-enhancing activities (Conner, 2014;Quinn, Spreitzer, & Lam, 2012).…”

“…Prior research also indicates a negative and significant relationship between employees' perceptions of organizational politics and their ability to meet their in-role performance requirements (Abbas et al, 2014;Rosen, Harris, & Kacmar, 2011), a relationship that might be clarified by mediating mechanisms such as higher job strain or lower work motivation and organizational commitment (Chang et al, 2009;Siu, Lu, & Spector, 2013;Yen, 2015). To add to this research stream, we consider an unexplored causal mechanism that might underpin the relationship between perceptions of organizational politics and job performance, namely, employees' beliefs that they have reached a career plateau (Foster, Lonial, & Shastri, 2011). This concept captures the extent to which the organization offers limited opportunities for employees' professional development and growth (Chao, 1990;Lee, 2003).…”