The chapters focused on drawing the conclusions based on the research findings. The limitations, research and practical implications and suggestions were also proposed for further practices and researches
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Conclusions
This research indicated the fact that affective commitment and normative commitment will not be affected by boundaryless career mindset. Therefore, the organization can expect the same level of affective commitment and normative commitment from those with boundaryless career mindset as any other individual. However, those with high boundaryless career mindset is expected to have high continuance commitment. Furthermore, this study has also demonstrated that an individual with a strong preference for organizational mobility will exhibit a lower commitment including affective commitment, continuance commitment and normative commitment. Therefore, the organizational mobility preference is the more important factor to be detected for the organizational commitment.
In addition, the research has confirmed that perceived organizational career management only makes impact on the relationship between boundaryless career mindset & continuance commitment and the relationship between organizational mobility preference and normative commitment. In the relationship between boundaryless career mindset and continuance commitment, the organizational career management helps to dismiss the influence of boundaryless career mindset on continuance commitment, which means regardless of having boundaryless career mindset or not, the employees will show continuance commitment to the company as long as they perceive the organizational career management from the company.
In the relationship between organizational mobility preference and normative commitment, the perceived organizational career management helps to weaken the relationship. It means that once provided with the organizational career management, the employees with high organizational mobility preference will show more obligation to the organization than not provided with organizational career management.
Lastly, the descriptive analyses revealed that the Vietnamese white-collar workers have a high boundaryless career attitude. It implies that they desire to develop more skills and knowledge to be more competent in the labor market. This is reasonable because Vietnamese economic is changing dramatically now and with many multinational or foreign investment company, it is required that Vietnamese labor needs to develop more to match with the market requirement.
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Implications
First of all, the focus of this study was to indicate the importance of understanding on the relationship between white-collars workers in Vietnam’s boundaryless career attitude and their commitment to the organizations as well as extending the understanding on the impact of organizational career management on the relationship. As mentioned in the literature review, there are still few studies examining the relationship of boundaryless career attitude and organizational commitment (Briscoe & Finkelstein, 2009) and none of them in Vietnam’s context. As a result, this study is expected to provide some insights to the literature regarding the boundaryless career mindset and organizational mobility preference. From the theoretical perspective, the findings in this study mainly supported the findings in previous studies conducted by Briscoe and Finkelstein (2009) and Cakmak-Otluoglu (2012) and Enache et al.
(2013). And for the current research, the hypotheses were tested based on Vietnam’s context, which has a collective culture in comparison with the individualism culture in Western countries. In addition, this study has contributed to the literature with empirically testing the impact of perceived organizational career management on the relationship between boundaryless career attitude and organizational commitment. As a result, this study filled a literature gap in understanding about the new career
Secondly, this study also provides some insights for the HR in Vietnam. The finding shows that there was no significant relationship between boundaryless career mindset and affective commitment and normative commitment. Therefore, it is advised that the HR should avoid the stereotype that employees with boundaryless career mindset will not be loyal to the organization and reject to recruit them. In fact, these individuals may be more suitable for or even perform better in the projects or assignments which requires to work or involve different people from different organizations. Furthermore, since this study showed that those with high organizational mobility preference will show less commitment to the organization.
Therefore, the employers either need to consider this factor when they recruit the employees or to cater for this growing desire. For big companies with different locations, they can transfer or rotate the employees so that the employees feel satisfied with the advancement chances and their desire for mobility.
Research Limitations
Due to the data collection, measurement and sample characteristics, some limitations need to be recognized in the study:
Firstly, the limitation of this study is that the sample was selected based on the
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convenience and limited to only 245 participants. Most of the participations are still young with the age under 30. Therefore, these findings may not represent the whole Vietnam’s workforce and thus may not be generalized to the entire population. In addition, since the data was collected from self-report questionnaire, the response might be subject to their perceptions and opinions and further it might be colored by how someone feels about the question at hand. As a result, the common source bias might affect the study (Brown, Williams, & Lees‐Haley, 1994). However, to address the concern, the questionnaire was anonymous and the instrument was designed in both 5-point and 7-point scale as well as used the reversed items.
Secondly, the current study was only conducted at this timing while the Vietnamese economic is still developing and not so stable. So maybe the result will change in the future following the change of the economic and social situation. In addition, the sample target was still general as white-collar workers in any industry and thus, the result might be not so accurate if applied in a specific industry due to the differences.
Thirdly, since the data was collected from Vietnamese workers, one concern is about whether the finding of this research can be applied to other Asian countries, which have similar culture to Vietnam or not.
Further Research Suggestions
Based on the limitations provided above, the researcher would like to make some suggestions for future researches. First of all, the researcher suggests that the future researches can replicate the study with a large sample from different age ranges so that they could compare the differences. This might give a greater possibility to generalize the results over the country. In addition, the future research could utilize not only quantitative but also qualitative methods. The qualitative study could be conducted through open-ended questions or the face-to-face interviews in order to gather the insights. The qualitative might help to enhance the deeper understanding about the boundaryless career attitude since this is not easy to be interpreted from only the data collected using questionnaires. Moreover, the current study utilized a convenience sample, a non-probability sampling method due to circumstances related to cost and time, we suggest that future study could use random sampling and reap the benefits of equal chance selection associated with probability sampling method.
Secondly, since our study is cross-sectional, the researcher suggests that the future study can be conducted as a longitudinal study in order to track the same group of white-worker
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collars through different time to observe the change of the results following the change of the economic and social situation. Furthermore, the future research may conduct the study targeting a specific industry and then compare the results. Another suggestion for future research is to do the study in other Southeast Asia countries in order to verify if the result is similar among these countries. Because even these are neighboring countries, which holds a lot of similar culture and situation but also perform some differences.
Finally, the research only investigated the effect of one moderator which is perceived organizational career management. However, there might be some other factors that may affect the relationship between boundaryless career attitude and organizational commitment.
Therefore, future research may extent to test other moderator variables such as the openness to experience or mastery-learning orientation.
Although the future researches are necessary for a better generalization, this study has filled an important gap in both theoretical literature and practical management.
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