مشاغل گوناگون و بدون مرز: اکتشاف تجربی

While the constructs of protean and boundaryless careers have informed career theory for years, rigorous empirical examinations of these career models have lagged behind. This study seeks to redress this situation by constructing and developing four new scales to measure protean and boundaryless career attitudes. The scales related to protean career attitudes measure self-directed career management and values-driven predispositions. The scales related to boundaryless career attitudes measure boundaryless mindset and organizational mobility preference. The initial validation of these scales, consisting of three studies, demonstrates their reliability and validity.

The decline of the traditional organizational career requires new ways of viewing careers. Over the last decade, two new perspectives on careers have emerged and become popular in the organizational literature: the protean career and the boundaryless career. The protean career as espoused by Hall, 1976 and Hall, 2002 focuses on achieving subjective career success through self-directed vocational behavior. The boundaryless career (Arthur, 1994) focuses on crossing both objective and subjective dimensions of career at multiple levels of analysis, including organizational position, mobility, flexibility, the work environment, and the opportunity structure while at the same time de-emphasizing reliance on organizational promotions and career paths. While the protean and boundaryless career models have been very successful in informing theory, they have prompted limited research and application because they lack operational definition by appropriate psychometric measures. This article describes the construction and initial validation of scales that measure protean career attitudes and boundaryless career attitudes. The new scales were correlated with existing measures to begin establishing their convergent validity.