This chapter presented the conclusions, discussion and implication based on the findings in this research. Future suggestions and limitation of this research were also provided.
Conclusion
Career plateau is a situation that employees encounter sooner or later in their career life, especially in a rapid changing era and a society full of SMEs like Taiwan.
In this study, the two proposed hypotheses were both tested. The significant relationship between career plateau and turnover intention is proven to be true and the hypothesis of the moderating effect of career anchor profiles is supported as well. The results indicated that certain individual factors do play an important role in employee’s turnover decision making process. In addition, three clusters were generated to have a better understanding of the sample that this research intended to investigate. The results did indicate several interesting findings that allowed the researcher to provide some academic insights and practical suggestions to the employers and human resource practitioners.
Discussion
In this research, there were two focuses, the first one was to investigate the relationship between career plateau and turnover intention in Taiwan. With a labor market so small and a high percentage of population working in SMEs, people face the plateau situation in their career quite often and soon. The consequence of career plateau that when employees are facing a plateau in their career, they are more likely to leave the organization and search for better development for their career in the labor market was found. This proved what was stated in the literature to be also true in Taiwan (Chao, 1990; Tremblay et al., 1995). The other focus of this study was to find out the moderating role of personal interests in the relationship between career plateau and turnover intention by using the career anchors profiles. Base on the model proposed by Mobley et al. (1979), individual’s personal interests do take part in the turnover decision making process. The findings of this research also supported the model. The effects of career anchor profiles from the three generated clusters did affect the relationship between career plateau and turnover intention differently.
The three clusters generated in this research were named as Low Career Pursuers, Mid-Career Pursuers and High Career Pursuers. The patterns of the eight career anchors from these three clusters generally represented three stages of an individual’s career development process. In the beginning, which is the Low Career Pursuers, it is the group with the lowest mean age among the three clusters. Therefore, the researcher reasonably presumed that these people were at the beginning of their career. They were still exploring what they want to pursue in their career and meanwhile accumulating experiences in their jobs. At this stage, they mainly focused on the stability and security of their job as well as the lifestyle to balance needs from personal, family and work. As to other anchors, since they were still discovering themselves or somehow disoriented on the career path, they scored low on these indicators. However, when times go by with their experiences all piled up, they developed into Mid-Career Pursuers.
When individuals got into the Mid-Career Pursuers group, they tended to have better understandings toward themselves. At this stage, all career anchors were rated a lot higher than Low Career Pursuers. The scores for Technical / Functional Competence, Pure Challenge and Service / Dedication to a Cause had significantly increased compared to the previous stage probably because individuals had chosen their professions and were cultivating them to maturity already. They wanted to sharpen their professional skills and make a different in their organization or to the society. However, they were yet well-prepared for taking over general managerial positions or create their own business outside the companies. This might be the reason why individuals scored relatively lower on General Managerial Competence and Entrepreneurial Creativity than other six anchors.
Finally, individuals entered the High Career Pursuers stage after being experienced and well-developed on all aspects. Their professional skills were mature and they were ready for general management positions in the company or perhaps leaving the company and running their own business with all the competences and skills they acquired after years of training. This might be the reason why the High Career Pursuers scored higher in General Managerial Competence and Entrepreneurial Creativity in comparison with the scores from Mid-Career Pursuers.
The hierarchical regression results also supported the abovementioned scenarios.
Generally, for both Mid-Career Pursuers and High Career Pursuers, career plateau did
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have significant positive effect on turnover intention. In addition, the effect of High Career Pursuers was stronger than that of Mid-Career Pursuers because with all skills and competence matured, High Career Pursuers were more likely to have stronger reactions when they faced a plateau situation in their career. Looking from the dimensional level of career plateau, Mid-Career Pursuers’ job content plateau did have stronger influence on turnover intention compare to High Career Pursuers. This fit the point that the most focused career anchors for Mid-Career Pursuers were Technical / Functional Competence, Service / Dedication to a Cause and Pure Challenge, which were all related to their job contents. If job content plateau happened on them, they would not be able to develop their professional skills and might decide to leave for other opportunities. As to hierarchical plateau, the effect on turnover intention from High Career Pursuers was the strongest for the reason that they would like to climb up the ladder for higher rankings, which usually means general managerial positions. When High Career Pursuers faced a hierarchical plateau that stop them from moving upward in the organizations, they would consider leaving the companies and create their own business.
To sum up, although the cluster analysis is a data driven result, the researcher believed the reasoning provided above was logical it also fits with Super’s Developmental Theory (1957) that individuals’ careers go through changes as they mature. The development patterns are determined by the experiences, opportunities and other socioeconomic factors they exposed to. People also develop their self-concepts through the work roles they experience on their career path. Even though the results might be different from the developmental stages and the corresponding age ranges Super proposed, the general idea of the theory matched well with the findings in this research.
Theoretical Implications
The research result demonstrates the importance of personal career-oriented interests/ factors that influence the relationship between career plateau and turnover intention. In other words, the significance of individuals’ career interests can very much affect their career decision. In addition, the result of cluster analysis proved the plurality of career anchors proposed be Feldman and Bolino (1996) to be true. Also, this research found that in accordance with previous studies, individuals’ career
anchors changed when people aged and went through life and career stages (Wey Smola, & Sutton, 2002; Rodrigues & Guest, 2010). The results also suggested that certain career-oriented variables can be utilized to study the career development stages nowadays. Future research can focus on different individual interests between the career plateau and turnover intention relationship with other career oriented variables.
Practical Implications
For practical implications, the important implication of the research is to understand the employees in the company. Knowing the needs and what they place a high value on is essential to keep talent within the companies as well as make the companies grow. Therefore, career orientation assessments and the design of individuals’ career path are crucial. Based on the findings in this research, for employees in different career stages: Low, Mid and High Career Pursuers, the most urgent needs for them to fulfill are Security / Stability, Technical / Functional Competence and General Managerial Competence respectively. Human resource practitioners can then identify and focus on fulfilling individuals’ needs to lower employees’ intention to leave and the actual turnover behavior.
Other than the focus on individuals’ needs, age is also an important indicator according to the cluster analysis. Employees in different age might result in different stages of their career development as well. Take corresponding measures for employees in different age range might be helpful for decreasing the turnover rate in the companies.
Limitations
A limitation of this study is that the researcher used convenient sampling by asking friends and connections to fill out the online questionnaires. In doing so, the result could be biased and might not be able to generalize to a larger society. Another limitation is that the design of questionnaire was only able to find out the important anchors; however, the most important anchor might not be able to identify. According to Schein (2016), the identification of one dominant anchor can be done by interviews with the research participants. Nevertheless, due to the limited time and budget, the researcher was not able to conduct a comprehensive study to identify each
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respondent’s dominant career anchor through an interview, but rather relied on the respondent’s self-report which might be biased. Finally, because of the sample was confined in Taiwan, due to cultural context, the results might not be generalizable.
Suggestions for Future Research
There are three suggestions for the future research. (1) As mentioned by Schein (2016), the future study regarding the career anchors can be done through the combination of both qualitative and quantitative research approaches. In this case, the researchers might be able to retrieve more accurate result of individuals’
career-oriented factors. (2) Individual factors between career plateau and turnover intention can be further studied with different individual career orientation variables, such as Holland Occupational Themes. In this case, researchers can understand employees’ needs from different angles. (3) Future researcher can focus on different cultural context or specific group of participants to investigate variation of career anchor profiles and career development stages.
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APPENDIX
國立臺灣師範大學 學術研究問卷
親愛的先生/女士您好:
本研究旨在暸解台灣員工職涯傾向與其工作行為。研究結果對員工及僱 主雙方皆有所幫助。懇請您撥冗協助填答此問卷。您於本問卷中提供的所 有資訊皆將保密且僅屬學術用途，您的填答不會與您的身份以及所屬公司 有所連結。若您同意以上敘述，即可開始作答。
本研究旨在暸解台灣員工職涯傾向與其工作行為。研究結果對員工及僱 主雙方皆有所幫助。懇請您撥冗協助填答此問卷。您於本問卷中提供的所 有資訊皆將保密且僅屬學術用途，您的填答不會與您的身份以及所屬公司 有所連結。若您同意以上敘述，即可開始作答。