Productivity or illusion? Assessing employees' behavior in an employability paradox

Abstract

PurposeEmployability has been studied in different disciplines (e.g. occupational health and career) and has been seen as a personal resource with overall positive outcomes. The present research investigates the behavioral implications of (perceived) employability and responds to the recent call of research that perceived employability could have not only positive but also negative behavioral implications. Furthermore, this study aims to reduce the asymmetry of data set and replication of existing results in non-Western economies.Design/methodology/approachMultinationals were taken as context to test the hypotheses, and a sample of 230 white-collar employees was drawn from fast-moving consumer goods companies. Partial least square–structural equation modeling through SmartPLS was used to analyze the data.FindingsIn light of social exchange theory, the present research identified the dark side of employability, which may impair the employer–employee relationship. Perceived employability did not relate significantly with in-role performance, nor did it correlate with organizational citizenship behavior, that is, a discretionary behavior promotes the efficient and effective functioning. However, perceived employability had a positive significant relationship with OCBI, that is, helping supervisors and coworkers with heavy workloads, as well as with counterproductive behaviors.Practical implicationsEmployable workers have always been considered key players and an asset for organizations due to their high productivity skills. A balanced employer–employee relationship creates a mutual win; therefore, a carefully drafted human resources policy may help organizations to fulfill the needs of employable workers and reap optimal benefits in terms of productivity. Behavioral training to supervisors/managers may help to assertively deal with employees' negative behavior without further escalation.Originality/valueThe present study suggests a paradoxical perspective in employability – a behavior debate, which is in an initial phase where it is difficult to determine whether employable workers are productive to the organizations or not.

Authentic leadership: unleashing employee creativity through empowerment and commitment to the supervisor

“…Another aspect is that our model focuses on individual creativity, and testing the same model at team level could be helpful in understanding the role of authentic leaders in teams (Hoch et al, 2018). Though data collected from the same source either in one or different time are being used in behavioral and leadership studies, causal influences cannot be treated as conclusive (Imam and Chambel, 2020;Xu et al, 2017). Even though we accounted for the common method variance in our dataset, common method bias may still exist.…”

Future orientation and perceived employability of chinese undergraduates: a moderated mediation model

“…Moreover, by employing the dynamics of the vocational behavior paradigm within the framework of career construction theory (Cwr et al, 2019), we identify a behavioral mediator-problem-based learning-linking the relationship between students' future orientation and their perceived employability. By opening the black box of the influence of future orientation on employability, we thus not only provide empirical findings that enrich the use of career construction theory in the employability literature (Forrier et al, 2015) but also underscore the empirical importance of the behavioral perspective for such research (Imam & Chambel, 2020).…”

Does the Employability Paradox Exist or Not? An Inverted U-Shaped Model

“…In the future, a perceived employability-actual turnover behavior based paradox should be adopted (Nelissen et al, 2017), with a cross cultural perspective suggested by Wong and Cheng (2020). Sixth, including this study, empirical findings on employability paradox were all limited in single-level significant models so far (see De Cuyper et al, 2011a;De Cuyper and De Witte, 2011;Acikgoz et al, 2016;De Vos et al, 2017;Nelissen et al, 2017;Imam and Chambel, 2020;Rodrigues et al, 2020). In the future, researchers could take high level factors into account, such as organization and team, to formulate a multilevel structure model of employability paradox.…”

“…The paradox of employability refers to the fact that improved employability can bring both positive impacts and negative risks to the organization (De Grip et al, 2004). The positive impact usually refers to improvement in employees' performance and organizational behaviors, whereas the negative impact is reflected in increased turnover intention, job search intensity and counterproductive work behaviors or reduced emotional organizational commitment (De Cuyper et al, 2011a;De Cuyper and De Witte, 2011;Acikgoz et al, 2016;De Vos et al, 2017;Nelissen et al, 2017;Imam and Chambel, 2020;Rodrigues et al, 2020). In this study, we focus on the paradox that improvement in perceived employability brings about the increase in both performance and turnover intention.…”

“…This paradox is mostly discussed in theory (e.g., De Grip et al, 2004;Van der Heijde and Van der Heijden, 2006), whereas there are few empirical tests. In the empirical field, except for De Cuyper et al (2011a) and Imam and Chambel (2020) who found that employability can bring positive and negative results at the same time, the remaining studies weaken or negate the employability paradox from the perspective of perceived internal and external employability (De Cuyper and De Witte, 2011;De Vos et al, 2017;Nelissen et al, 2017;Rodrigues et al, 2020). For example, Nelissen et al (2017) believed that to explain why employability has different effects on the same variable, it should be discussed from the perspectives of internal and external employability, respectively, because they may have opposite effects on the same outcome variable: the former reduces turnover and the latter promotes turnover.…”