UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY International School of Business ----------------------------- Tran Ha Quyen FACTORS AFFECTING INDIVIDUALS’ SUBJECTIVE CAREER SUCCESS MASTER OF BUSINESS (Honours) Ho Chi Minh City – Year 2017 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY International School of Business ----------------------------- Tran Ha Quyen FACTORS AFFECTING INDIVIDUALS’ SUBJECTIVE CAREER SUCCESS ID: 22130060 MASTER OF BUSINESS (Honours) SUPERVISOR: Dr. NGUYEN THI MAI TRANG Ho Chi Minh City – Year 2017 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com This page is intentionally left blank. LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com DECLARATION I hereby declare that: student’s work or from any other source except where due acknowledgement and citation is made in the thesis. This work has not been published.
Signature: Tran Ha Quyen 1 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This thesis could not be complete without support, guidance, and encouragement of many people. I would want to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Nguyen Thi Mai Trang, for her tremendous patience and professional guidance to my thesis. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all the members of the examination committee for their valuable comments and suggestions for my thesis.
I would want to thank all of my lecturers at International Business School at University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City for their teaching and guidance during my Master course. I also want to send a big thank you to the program coordinator, Ms. Lien Nguyen, for her continuous admin support and paper work guidance. I would like to thank my colleagues for their encouragement during the progress of this thesis.
Last but not least, I want to express my great thank you to my husband and family for their assistance and encouragement for my study. 2 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ABSTRACT This study examines the factors affecting individuals’ subjective career success based on the sponsor and contest mobility of career success (Turner, 1960; Rosenbaum, 1984). Subjective career success has been normally approached by three perspectives: individual, structural, and behavioral in which the individual and behavioral approaches belong to the contest-mobility model of career success while the structural one belongs to the sponsored-mobility model. With critical components of individuals’ subjective career success such as organizational sponsorship, external marketability, person-organization fit, and its consequence which is life satisfaction, the research makes an attempt to examine all of the three perspectives mentioned.
Research findings indicate that organizational sponsorship and external marketability make significant impacts on subjective career success and these relationships are positive. This study also examines a number of personal information like gender, marital status, age, highest diploma, occupation, number of working years, and monthly salary when it comes to perceived career success. In addition, subjective career success also positively affects life satisfaction. The findings have important practical implications for managers and leaders, who generally seek to motivate their employees toward career achievement.
Key words: individuals’ subjective career success, organizational sponsorship, external marketability, person-organization fit, life satisfaction 3 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS. 4 LIST OF TABLES. 6 LIST OF FIGURES.
6 LIST OF APPENDICES. Structure of the thesis. The nature of subjective career success. Person-organization fit and subjective career success.
Organizational sponsorship and subjective career success. External marketability and subjective career success .6 Subjective career success and life satisfaction. 26 4 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. Sampling and data collection.
Scale reliability and validity. Convergent and discriminant validity. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). CFA for subjective career success.
CFA for measurement model. The overall fitness of the structural equation model. Hypothesis testing results. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS.
Key findings of the study. Limitations of the study and future research. 52 5 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Operationalization of the variables.
Descriptive statistics of demographic variables (Base=150). Descriptive statistics of items (Base=150). Cronbach’s alpha coefficients. Assessment of convergent validity.
Assessment of discriminant validity. Hypothesis testing results .41 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. CFA for subjective career success. CFA for measurement model .39 6 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF APPENDICES APPENDIX A - IN-DEPTH INTERVIEW .53 APPENDIX C- QUESTIONNAIRE – VIETNAMESE .63 APPENDIX D - DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS .67 APPENDIX E - MODEL FIT SUMMARY .68 APPENDIX F - CORREATION COEFFICIENTS .71 APPENDIX G - REGRESSION WEIGHTS FOR HYPOTHESIS TESTING .72 APPENDIX H - REGRESSION WEIGHTS FOR CONTROL VARIABLES .76 7 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.
Research background Most of Vietnamese people are under working age. According to the General Statistics Office of Vietnam, the labor force is considered above 15 years old. In the year of 2013, 58.2% of the Vietnam population was employed and the majority of the labor was between 25 and 49 years old accounting for 59.9% of the above-15 labor force (General Statistics Office of Vietnam, 2015). Therefore, there is a need to help the employed enhance their career success in terms of both subjective career success and objective career success so that the employees could contribute more values to their organizations and themselves.
A career is the opening sequence of a person's work experiences over time and across multiple jobs, organizations, and occupations (Arthur, Hall, & Lawrence, 1989; Feldman, 1989). Subjective career success refers to individuals' perceptual evaluations of, and affective reactions to, their careers (Greenhaus et al. In the early 1950s, social scientists observed significant variance in the way individuals saw success in their own career (Gattiker & Larwood, 1986; Pellegrin & Coates, 1957). Researchers report that a growing proportion of employees determine their career success in terms of subjective indicators than in terms of objective indicators such as wage and frequency of promotions (Eith, Stummer, & Schusterschitz, 2011; Littler, Wiesner, & Dunford, 2003; Sturges, Guest, Conway, & Davey, 2002).
Due to the compelling evidence, to investigate and understand the components of subjective career success is a significant and meaningful work for every individual in the labor force. This research investigates the overview components of the individuals’ subjective career success so every people in the labor force can take advantage of the research results. Based on the implication of the 8 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com research, employees can understand more about what kind of components influence their career success in their organizations, which one weighs the largest and which one weighs the least so that they can recognize their strengths and weaknesses in order to make improvement where needed. In addition, the management board can also definitely rely on the research insights to recognize whether the reward system and the company policy fit their employees’ expectation or not.
Research problem Subjective career success is often a drive for individuals’ lives, as a result understanding how to continuously enhance subjective career success is a need. Meanwhile there are many researches conducted to investigate the factors of subjective career success taken in developed economies (Shen et al., 2015; Tlaiss & Kauser, 2011; Lirio et al., 2007), there is less study of these drives carried out in such an emerging economy like Vietnam. In addition, after the global economic crisis since 2008, the unemployed has been increasing (Tanveer et al., 2012), therefore the labor force really needs to know how to remain their subjective career success by understanding the components of the career success. In Vietnam, the unemployed at the working age proportion had jumped from 2.90% in 2009, followed by a dramatic decrease between 2010 with 2.96%; however the proportion tends to be increasing because there is 2.18% unemployment in the year 2013 (General Statistics Office of Vietnam, 2015).
Moreover, the competitiveness in the labor force in the global job market nowadays becomes fierce since Vietnam has been open and joining several associations to impulse the economic development of the nation such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the forthcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Therefore, doing such a study like this not only helps the unemployed but also the employed in the labor force remain 9 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com and enhance their career success. This situation pushes a need to examine the factors affecting individuals’ subjective career success. Research objectives The overall objective of this study is to examine some antecedences and consequences of individuals’ subjective career success in the Vietnamese context.
Specifically, it investigates four factors taken into consideration which are organizational sponsorship, external marketability, person- organization fit, and life satisfaction as follows: The relationship between person-organization fit and individuals’ subjective career success; The relationship between organizational sponsorship and individuals’ subjective career success; The relationship between external marketability and individuals’ subjective career success; The relationship between individuals’ subjective career success and life satisfaction. Research scope This study examines the factors affecting individuals’ subjective career success based on the sponsor and contest mobility of career success (Turner, 1960; Rosenbaum, 1984). Subjective career success has been normally approached by three perspectives: individual, structural, and behavioral in which the individual and behavioral approaches belong to the contest-mobility model of career success while the structural one belongs to the sponsored-mobility model. With the four components of individuals’ subjective career success: organizational sponsorship, external marketability, 10 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com person-organization fit, and life satisfaction, the research makes an attempt to examine all of the three perspectives mentioned.
This study specifically focuses on the employees who necessarily have at least two years of working experience in Vietnam after graduation and they have to be between 22 and 59 years old. Both indirect method of data collection via electronic mail and online survey and direct method of data collection via hard copies will be used to deliver questionnaires to participants. The convenient sampling approach was employed for this study in order to obtain an expected sample size. Structure of the thesis This thesis is organized as follows: Chapter 1 introduces the statement of the problems, research questions and objectives, scope of the research and thesis structure.
Chapter 2 presents literature review including the definition of each concept and their relationships in previous studies. Hypothesis and conceptual model are then proposed based on literature review. Chapter 3 illustrates the method of setting up the measures and conducting the study. It presents the research design, development of survey questionnaire, and main survey.
Chapter 4 shows the research results based on data analysis and discuss these findings in connection with research model. Chapter 5 summarizes the research results and indicates implications and limitations of the study. 11 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. LITERATURE REVIEW This section introduces an overview of subjective career success and its factors which have been discussed in previous studies.
Based on these, a conceptual model is proposed. Theoretical foundation The research was developed based on the career success theories of sponsored and contest mobility (Turner, 1960; Rosenbaum, 1984). Turner (1960) identified two different systems of career mobility: one based on a contest-mobility norm and the other based on a sponsored-mobility norm. A system which follows the contest-mobility norm allows for a fair and open contest for each promotion decision.
The contest-mobility norm assumes that employees’ attainments are largely a function of how hard they work and the ability, education, and training they possess (Rosenbaum, 1984). This implies that the contest-mobility norm is represented by a hybrid of motivation and human capital theories whereby motivation may be represented by the employees’ effort on the job and human capital by the employees’ education level, work experience, and participation in training programs. In contrast, under the sponsored-mobility norm, selected individuals receive high levels of support and guidance from superiors (Rosenbaum, 1984).