A Study On Relationship Among New Managers’ Job Challenges,Self-reflection,and Career Adaptability

The progress of economic and technology leads to uncertain market environment with high risks.Managers cannot improve their capacities through traditional ways.Job challenges may become a vital source for leadership development.Based on the experience-driven leadership development theory,self-reflection is the important tool for managers to learn from job challenges.Many vital leadership development questions cannot be answered without an adequate conceptualization and assessment of intraindividual change.Manager’s adaptation is a dynamic progress,and therefore absolute or average level data cannot capture systematic change of the progress.Using a latent growth modeling approach to data collected,the study modeled interindividual differences in intraindividual changes in job challenges,self-reflection and adaptation outcomes(voluntary turnover,leadership behavior,social leadership behavior),and took new managers’ proactive behavior aimed enhancing role identity into account.The study applied content analysis to collect variables data by coding 12 rounds of new managers’ learning reports.Intraindividual change over time is the essence of the change phenomenon hypothesized to occur in the individual new managers’ adaptation process.The results showed that job challenges exerted indirect effect on proactive behavior via self-reflection and that the intraindividual slope of job changes exerted indirect effect on voluntary turnover and the slope of proactive behavior via the slope of self-reflection.The results also showed that self-reflection yielded indirect effect on leadership behavior via proactive behavior and that the intraindividual slope of self-reflection yielded indirect effect on the slope of leadership behavior via the slope of proactive behavior.