The chapter one covers the overall picture of this research including the background of study, the problem statement, the study purpose, the research questions, the study significance and the definitions of key concepts.
Background of Study
To date, the marketable competiveness and technology changes influencing organizations on the retaning and developing talents. Workforce mobility has become a common phenomenon. One of the typical reasons is the characteristic of the workforce generation changed from Gen X workers (1961-1980) to milleninal workers (1981-2000). The millenial workers, also known as Gen Y, are mostly the childrens of Baby boomers (1946 - 1960), and were grown up in the stage of globalization, speedy technological development and increasing diversity (Burke & Ng, 2006). Therefore, many previous researches revealed that the millennial workers are more side in demanding a variety of works, have less realistic career expectations (Ng, Schweitzer, & Lyons, 2010). The millennials were also reported as a lower rate of organizational commitment, and less intention to remain their work in the same organization while compared with other previous generation (D’Amato & Herzfeldt, 2008;
Lyons, Ng, & Schweitzer, 2012). As a result, the turnover rate among the millennials is frequently higher than Gen X and Baby Boomers. In a study conducted by Deloitte (2018), 12,299 millennials across 36 countries were questioned. The report showed that 43 percent of the millennial workers will leave the company within two years which denotes the less of loyalty, and in an uncertain environment, turnover will likely remain high (Deloitte, 2018).
In Vietnam, the major workforce is millennial workers. A report from Navigos Group (2017) published that millenial workers in Vietnam were equal to one-third of the population, and obtained fifty percent of the workforce (International Labour Organization, ILO, 2017).
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Therefore, belonging with the high turnover rate among millennial workers around the world, Vietnam’s turnover rate has been rocketed steadily. A report conducted by Anphabe about organizational working environment in 2018 asserted that voluntary employees’ leaves was 20 percent increasing 4% from 2017, and the turnover rate was forecasted to continuly reach to the higher alarming rate at 24% in 2019 (Anphabe, 2018). This trend raised concerns for organizations because no matter what employees’ leaves are voluntary or involuntary, it costs the organizations and has seriously negative consequences. The organization get big loss of organizational knowledge and relationships when employees leave. Besides, the company also needs to recruit and train new employees to fill the vacancy. The report from Anphabe (2018) showed that the total cost was equally up to one or two years of leaving employee’s salary to replace the position and to train a new one to be familiar with the job as the former, it yielded a huge cost burden for organizations. To eliminate these problems, it is needed to have a particular research to understand the employee’s orientation and strengthen the employee’s intention to stay.
In Vietnam, the millennial workers also believe in the advantage of technology development in the industry 4.0 which brings the organizational changes and the market changes (Navigos Group, 2017). Owning those believes and internal characteristics, the millennial workers have modified their career attitude to ensure their career management. As a result, more and more millennial employees prefer managing their career by themselves and seeking for their career enhancement (Direnzo & Greenhaus, 2011). One of the evidences for these attitude types is protean career orientation. Protean career orientation emphasizes an individual’s career attitutes to which individuals self-directedly manage his or her own career and use instrinsic values to drive the career path (Hall, 2002). Hall (1976, 2002) introduced the protean career orientation having two dimensions of self-direction in career management, and value-driven orientation. Previous studies implied that protean employees have high level of
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organizational commitment (Fernandez & Enache, 2008; Rodrigues, Guest, Oliveira, & Alfes, 2008), which possibly turns to stay intention. Moreover, protean career orientation fosters employees to mastery their learning (Briscoe & Hall, 2006), motivates employees to obtain the psychological success (Hall, 2002). Besides, when individuals perceive that the organization support to their learning and pay attention on their career well-being, they feel happier and more attached with the organization (Eisenberger, Huntington, Hutchison, & Sowa, 1986), resulting in a tendency to stay longer (Naim & Lenkla, 2016). Thus, understanding the employee’s protean career orientation helps employers to support employees’ learning and attach to the organization.
Moreover, as mentioned above that employees are likely to prolong their current organizational membership if they are cognizant of the learning chances provided from the organization. Hence, it is essential to have a learning supportive culture in the organization.
Organizational learning culture has been taken into a key factor which not only helps the organizations retain the most talented employees (Joo & Shim, 2010), but also assist the organization surviving in the context of competitive market (Garwin, 1993). When organizations build their culture with learning-oriented development, they encourage their employees to enhance the protean career orientation (Park & Rothwell, 2009), and also motivate the employees to maintain their employing status with organization. In that sense, this study selects the perceived organizational learning culture as a moderator to test whether it plays as an important role to rocket the employees’ intention to stay.
Problem Statement
The concept of “new career” referenced by boundaryless career and protean career has been studied recently. However, since these two concepts are somehow overlapped about the career attitudes which employees have their own values as a guidance and proactively seek for new opportunities in the career path (Briscoe & Hall, 2006; Briscoe & Finkelstein, 2009), many
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scholars have focused on the boundaryless career attitude, rather than protean career orientation (Gubler, Arnold, & Coombs, 2014; Supeli & Creed, 2016). Even implementing research on protean career, most of the studies on protean career orientation focus on the consequences such as career success (e.g. job satisfaction (Waters, Briscoe, Hall, & Wang, 2014), employability (De Vos & Soens, 2008; Lin, 2015), work-life balance (Direnzo, Greenhaus, &
Weer, 2015)) but not on the employees’ intention to stay. The reason of this shortage is based on the assumption that protean career orientation brings the employees the mindset of self-management and proactive personality (Briscoe & Hall, 2006), which results in mobility orientation (Briscoe, Hall, & DeMuth, 2006) and less in intention to stay in the organization (Briscoe & Finkelstein, 2009). However, the assumption comes from the studies mostly investigated in Europe and North America (Hall, Yip, & Dorion, 2018) which presents the Western culture, specifically individualism cultural context. Individualism refers to the indication of “I” and “everyone is expected to look after themselves and their immediate family”
(Hofstede, Hofstede, & Minkov, 2005, p.53). In constrast, Vietnam has a particular culture which is considered as a mix culture of both individualism and collectivism. It has a particular history with different major cultural periods: (1) the local accient culture in the period of Stone Age to 208 Before Christ (BC), (2) the Confucius culture influenced by China from 208 BC till the present, and (3) the interaction with Western culture since the 16th century (Tran, 2006).
According to Nguyen, Terlouw, and Pilot (2005), Vietnamese people were more indivualistic and the most collectivist comparing to China and the US. Based on these arguments, the researcher believes that the individualism might provide to Vietnam millenial workers a protean career orientation, but collectivism with its characteristics of “cohesive in-groups which continue to protect them throughout their lifetime in exchange for unquestioning loyalty”
(Hofstede et al., 2005, p.53) will influence different behaviors among Vietnamese people in the workplace. Therefore, this study conducted in Vietnam context cultivates the field of
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protean career orientation in a mix culture and its influence on employee’s organizational
behavior.
Turnover intention was predicted from both organizational-related factors and individual factors (Allen & Meyer, 1990). In previous literature review, a huge amount of studies has proved that either individual factors such as autonomy (Stokes et al., 2013), career self-management (De Vos, Dewettinck, & Buyens, 2008), self-efficacy (Baruch, Humbert, &
Wilson, 2016) or organizational-related factors (e.g. reward structure (Stokes, et al., 2013);
competence development (Naim & Lenkla, 2016)) significantly affects employee’s career decision of staying or leaving, previous studies did not pay attention to combine both factors to predict employee’s willing or not willing to move out of an organization (De Vos, Dewettinck, & Buyens, 2008). This study which proposes both individual factor (protean careeer orientation) and organizational factor (organizational learning culture) influencing on empoyee’s intention fill the gap of the literature review.
Purpose of the Study
Because of the importance of employee’s membership perpetuation in an organization, the researcher aims to investigate how employees’ protean career orientation affects the intention to stay. Besides, it is important to examine if the organizational encouragement and organizational resources motivating employees to learn and develop push employee’s tendency to hold their membership in the organization. Therefore, this research is to study whether perceived organizational learning culture significantly moderates the relationship between protean career orientation and intention to stay among the employees.
Research Questions
In this study, two major research questions are addressed:1. Will employees with high protean career orientation intend to stay in the organization?
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2. Will organizational learning culture positively moderate the relationship between protean career orientation and intention to stay?
Significance of the Study
Both theorical and practical aspects are contributed in this research. Firstly, investigating the protean career orientation in the collective culture is rarely undertaken in previous studies (Sullivan & Baruch, 2009; Thomas & Inkson, 2007). Secondly, focusing on the investigation of organizational learning culture’s moderating impact on the connection of protean career orientation and intention to stay, the research provides both individual factor and organizational factor to a research of organizational behavior. Hence, the research adds more perspective and fulfill studies on organizational behavior research.
In practice, an organization in general or human resource department specifically expect to find other strategies to create the learning environment for the purpose of keeping employees staying in organization. Practitioners can follow the recommendations proposed in this study to help their process of recruiting, enhancing and maintaining talents in an organization, and it may help lessen the intention to leave. Moreover, Hall (1996) asserted that an organization is neccessarily aware of creating the continuous learning culture to enhance employees’ protean career attitude and increase their intention to staying longer.
Definitions of Terms Protean Career Orientation
Protean career orientation represents individuals’ career attitudes in which an individual aspires to manage the career by himself or herself directedly, and be navigated by intrinsic values in the career management (Hall, 2002).
Intention to Stay
Intention to stay is the extent to which employees plan to prolong their current membership with an employer (Kim, Price, Mueller, & Watson, 1996).
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Perceived Organizational Learning Culture
Organizational learning culture is delineated as “a concept that reflects organizational behavior from the perspective of learning and development (Yang, 2003, p.152). It has been developed according to the concept of learning organization (Marsick & Watkins, 2003) which emphasizes the cultural viewpoint to measure the organizational learning activities (Yang, 2003).
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