ANTECEDENTS AND OUTCOMES OF CAREER COMMITMENT

Abstract

The contemporary interest in careers has precipitated a great deal of research interest in careers and career-related experiences. ln spite of the interest in careers, most of the career research has focused on career development and relatively little attention has been paid to career commitment. The study reported here sought to redress this imbalance in career research by examining the antecedents and outcomes of career commitment. Based on London's (1983) Theory of Career Motivation, a model of career commitment was proposed. The first part of the model focused on the five sets of antecedents hypothesized to influence career commitment. The antecedent sets were demographic, personality, extra work, organizational and work-related attitudes. The second part of the model focused on the outcomes of career commitment. Five variables ( skill development, work quality, time devoted to work, job and career withdrawal intentions) were hypothesized to be outcomes of career commitment. Data were obtained using structured questionnaires, and respondents were high school teachers and nurses employed in Singapore. The sample was divided into male teachers, female teachers and female nurses. This was done in order to examine gender and occupation specific differences in the hypothesized model and test the generalizability of the model. Of the 650 questionnaires distributed, 510 completed and usable ones were returned for a response rate of 78.5 %. As there were only 16 male nurses, they were excluded from the analysis. The main analyses techniques were Pearson product-moment correlation and hierarchical regression. The model accounted for 57% of the variance in career commitment in the sample of male teachers, 55% in the sample of female teachers and 40% in the sample of female nurses. Of the five antecedent sets, personality and work-related attitudes were consistently significant predictors in all three samples. The impact of demographic. organizational and extrawork antecedent sets on career commitment was gender and occupation specific. Regarding the outcome variables, skill development showed a significant positive correlation with career commitment in all three samples while job and career withdrawal intentions showed significant negative correlation with career commitment in all three samples. ln sum, the hypothesized antecedents of career commitment were gender and occupation specific while the outcome measures were generalizable across gender and occupations. Limitations of the study, implications of the findings and directions for future studies were discussed.