Too much or too little? A study of the impact of career complexity on executive adaptability

Abstract

Purpose -In today's turbulent business environment leaders must be able to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. For this research the authors aim to focus on the issue of adaptability defined as the ability to work effectively within a variety of changing situations, and with various individuals or groups. They also aimed to examine how variables of career complexity affect development of adaptability. Design/methodology/approach -The authors draw on a unique database containing the career histories of 52 senior executives in a major global corporation. They use the term career complexity to represent the degree of variety in these individuals' career experiences, and they test the degree to which career complexity contributes to the development of adaptability later in their careers. Findings -Findings from this study shed light on the relationship between specific career experiences and executive adaptability. Executives who had the experience to serve in an executive assistant role developed higher levels of adaptability. For executives without the executive assistant opportunity, job rotations through different types of roles provided a boost to their adaptability. Three role type changes (e.g. line, staff, or matrix) is optimal; 100 months is an optimal time to spend in each role type. Originality/value -While the field of leadership development has generated substantial insight into the competencies required by executives, there are few models and empirical studies that describe the process of how specific competencies are developed. The authors' study highlighted the utility of the career complexity construct for both prospective understanding of career actions and processes and retrospective understanding of paths, patterns, and outcomes. The authors demonstrated the predictive value of the career complexity construct by presenting results of the statistical analyses of the hypothesized relationships between career complexity and career outcomes.

How uncertainty affects career behaviour: A narrative approach

“…However, our participants explained their sense of success derived from the uncertainty of the journey, rather than the certainty of reaching an outcome as the focal point of success. These findings support the growing call to address the contextual and dynamic nature of career success and extend findings that support thriving careers for those who engage in proactive career behaviour (Eby et al, 2003) or the increased ability to adapt to the turbulent environment through multiple role changes (Zhu et al, 2013).…”

#Trending topics in careers: a review and future research agenda

“…Lin, 2015;Lu et al, 2016;Vanhercke et al, 2015), or on employability competencies (e.g. Van der Klink et al, 2014;Van Emmerik et al, 2012;Zhu et al, 2013), which represent two of the most dominant streams of employability literature in general. Also, some studies (e.g.…”

More Hype Than Substance? A Meta-Analysis on Job and Task Rotation

“…In jobs with rotation, they found, for example, greater motivation (r = 0.44; Muramatsu et al, 1982; where necessary, values are converted to correlation coefficient r for easier comparison) and labor flexibility (r = 0.57; Sawhney, 2013), decreased mental fatigue (r = −0.32, Jones and James, 2018), a lower incidence of carpal tunnel syndrome (r = −0.23; Roquelaure et al, 1997), and increased process innovation performance (r = 0.21; Pini and Santangelo, 2005). However, some studies also reported contradicting significant results for motivation (r = −0.17; Mohsan et al, 2012), employee adaptability (r = −0.41; Zhu et al, 2013), employee energy (r = −0.09; Luger et al, 2016), incidence of upper-extremity musculoskeletal disorders (r = 0.07; Roquelaure et al, 2009), and innovation performance (r = −0.11; Song et al, 2010). Thus, despite much interest in job and task rotation from a variety of disciplines and from researchers and practitioners alike, there are still questions left unanswered: Does rotation really provide the benefits that organizations expect?…”