This study examines the effect of objective and subjective career plateau on the attitudes and behavior at work of a population of 2183 managers from three sectors of the Canada economy. Our study corroborates others that have found that "plateaued" and "non-plateaued" individuals respond differently to their work environment. Our results indicate that career plateau is associated with a number of consequences, once we have controlled for the effects of a number of personal characteristics such as age, sex, education, seniority and hierarchical level. The study also shows that the explanatory power of the subjective career plateau is significantly greater than that of objective career plateau. The explained variance in reactions is increased by at most 1% with the introduction of objective plateau for career satisfaction, while introducing subjective plateau into the model has the effect of increasing its explanatory power by 12%.

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This article examines the effects of various individual and organizational variables on two measures of career plateau, an objective measure of job stability and a subjective evaluation of having reached a dead end. The study is based on a sample of 2,183 managers from all organizational ranks, representing 41 business establishments and three Canadian economic sectors. The results show wide differences between the variables explaining the fact of having reached a career plateau and the feeling of being in a dead end. The best predictors of objective plateau are objective factors such as past success, age, and education. For the subjective plateau, personal variables such as desire for advancement and personality (locus of control) play the most important role. In both cases, individual factors come out as better predictors of career plateau than familial and organizational factors.

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