The "new career" and organizational commitment: Do boundaryless and protean attitudes make a difference?

Career structures, attitudes, and behaviors have shifted dramatically since the days of the "corporate career" ([29] Hall, 1976) in which the organization was assumed to be the primary career driver. While [29] Hall (1976) originally identified an emerging, self-directed or "protean" career in relief to the corporate career, several factors have propelled such less traditional career models into the mainstream of academia and popular understanding. More dynamic economic conditions ([18] Cappelli, 1999) and more transactional/hybrid (versus relational) psychological contracts ([49], [50] Rousseau, 1995, 2003; [51] Rousseau and Schalk, 2000) suggest that an independent approach to the career is, at times, warranted. Along these lines, Arthur and his colleagues ([6] Arthur, 1994; [9] Arthur et al. , 1999) have advanced the notion of the "boundaryless" career and even suggested career metacompetencies that enable one to better identify and pursue opportunities across boundaries ([24] DeFillippi et al. , 2006). In contrast, [12] Baruch (2006) has pointed out that the extreme version of the new career portrayed by the recent literature may be overreaching the reality of the average career experience and that most people are neither entirely independent and boundaryless, nor are they held captive to their organizations. [33] Inkson (2006) has challenged the metaphors of protean and boundaryless careers in particular suggesting that they not be taken too literally.

Additional empirical data on the new career, including protean and boundaryless perspectives, is needed to help sort out fact from fiction. In this article, we explore the relationship between "protean" and "boundaryless" attitudes (respectively) associated with the "New Career" and organizational commitment. Because people who hold protean attitudes are thought to be more self-directed, and those with boundaryless career attitudes are thought to be more agentic and mobile ([29], [31] Hall, 1976, 2002; [6] Arthur, 1994; [10] Arthur et al. , 2005), a logical extension of these attitudes is the possibility that people demonstrating these career orientations could be less committed to their organizations. Given the centrality of the career to the individual and commitment to individuals and organizations alike, relationships between these variables demand attention. To better understand how organizational commitment might be impacted by those who do hold boundaryless or protean career attitudes, we will first review these important theoretical and empirical constructs.

The new...