Career success through the past six decades: A bibliometric analysis

Abstract

All companies strive for sustainable growth and performance, a complex task in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment, with evolving legislation transforming the roles and responsibilities of leaders, while being closely watched by investors. Besides the ongoing effect of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the 2020 multidimensional crisis challenged the worldwide status quo in many respects, accelerating the rhythm of change for business models and questioning the leadership competences, motivation, and practices, due to new ways of working, interaction, and collaboration, and different ways the teams are now led and are expecting to be led. The career success is a dynamic concept that evolved over the past decades, being studied through numerous lenses, such as its predictors and antecedents, personal anchors (values and beliefs) and personality traits, own preparation for the professional road (education and learning), drivers, demographics, life choices, and the career capital. This analysis follows the topic of career success over the last six decades, showing the citation evolution of papers on the subject, and identifying the most related articles, as well as the most related journals. The findings are based on a quantitative analysis of Scopus indexed documents, with a qualitative highlight on the most related articles and the most cited articles of the most influential authors.