The Relationship Between Career Plateau And Counterproductive Work Behavior

Career plateau is the stagnation of individual career development in organizations.It mainly includes hierarchy plateau and job content plateau.Organizational changes have fundamentally changed career experience of employees.Structural adjustment to refinement and flattening means a reduction in the number of senior positions in the organization,and more and more employees will perceive career plateau.Career plateau is not a new phenomenon in organizations.Western scholars have begun to pay attention to it since 1970 s.Career plateau is inevitable for most people and it has quickly become an important management and organizational issues.Career plateau is considered to be a bad career experience,so scholars mainly focus on its negative effects.Although scholars have conducted many explorations about career plateau issues,there are still many research gaps that have seriously hindered us to understand career plateau further.This study constructs a moderated mediating model that is about the relationship between career plateau and counterproductive work behavior.The study investigates 264 employees who mainly work in Hubei,Anhui,Jiangsu,Henan and Guangdong province.The results are as follows: hierarchy plateau and job content plateau have positive effects on counterproductive work behavior;hierarchy plateau and job content plateau have positive effects on work alienation;work alienation plays a mediating role in the relationship between hierarchy plateau/job content plateau and counterproductive work behavior;participation in decision-making negatively moderate the relationship between hierarchy plateau and work alienation,and it also negatively moderate the indirect effect of work alienation on the relationship between hierarchy plateau and counterproductive work behavior.The study discusses the influence mechanism of career plateau on counterproductive work behavior based on conservation of resource theory,which extend researches of effect of career plateau and enrich theoretical system of career plateau.The findings of this study also have some important practical implications.Firstly,hierarchy plateau is inevitable for most employees,so employees and organizations should put much effort on remodeling culture about job value.Meanwhile,organizations can provide flexible and multiple career paths;Secondly,in order to lower the perceptions of job content plateau,organizations should pay more attention to training and job redesign and job rotation can also be used.Finally,managers should actively know about employees’ psychology and lower their negative psychological perceptions.Because different people need different psychological resources,managers should take different measures to manage employees who are on different types of career plateau.