Abstract
Careerism refers to an individual’s propensity to achieve their personal and career goals through nonperformance-based activities (Feldman, The Indus Org Psychol 39–44, 1985). We investigated the role of several dispositional predictors of careerism, including Five-factor model (FFM) personality traits, primary psychopathy, and exchange ideology. Based on data from 131 respondents, as expected, we observed that emotional stability was negatively correlated with careerism. Primary psychopathy and exchange ideology explained additional variance in careerism after accounting for FFM traits. Relative importance analyses indicated that psychopathy (relative weight percentage of explained variance = 42.1 %) and exchange ideology (relative weight percentage = 44.1 %) were equally important in predicting careerism. We highlight the need for future research efforts investigating the combined effects of contextual factors—particularly, human resource practices—and individual differences to understand careerism in the workplace.
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Notes
Sex and age of participants was available only for 72 % (n = 94) of the sample.
To compare the present study's mean and standard deviation of careerism with information from other studies, we transformed all the scales to a common scale ranging from 1 to 7.
Abbreviations
- FFM:
-
Five-factor model
- RW:
-
Relative weight
References
References marked with an asterisk indicate studies included in the meta-analysis for estimating careerism means and standard deviations
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Acknowledgments
We thank Mina Beigi and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, and Chris Berry, In-Sue Oh, and Ryan Zimmerman for data analysis advice. During the completion of this research, Gonzalo J. Muñoz was supported by grants from the Ministry of Education of Chile through its program “MECE Educación Superior 2,” and the University Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago, Chile.
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Chiaburu, D.S., Muñoz, G.J. & Gardner, R.G. How to Spot a Careerist Early On: Psychopathy and Exchange Ideology as Predictors of Careerism. J Bus Ethics 118, 473–486 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-012-1599-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-012-1599-5