Understanding organizational embeddedness and career success: Who and what you know

• Author: Maria L. Kraimer,Scott E. Seibert,Kohyar Kiazad,Leisa Sargent
• Date: 01 September 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2464
• Published date: 01 September 2020

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Understanding organizational embeddedness and career

success: Who and what you know

Kohyar Kiazad

1

| Maria L. Kraimer

2

| Scott E. Seibert

2

| Leisa Sargent

3

1

Centre for Global Business, Monash

University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

2

School of Management and Labor Relations,

Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey, U.

S.A.

3

School of Management, University of New

South Wales, Kensington, New South Wales,

Australia

Correspondence

Kohyar Kiazad, Monash University, Sir John

Monash Drive. Melbourne, Victoria 3145,

Australia

Email: kohyar.kiazad@monash.edu

Funding information

Australian Research Council, Grant/Award

Number: LP0882114

Summary

Integrating job embeddedness theory with the sponsored and contest mobility per-

spectives, we developed and tested a model linking organizational embeddedness

with two indicators of career success within the organization (promotion and career

satisfaction), via the mediating roles of employees' organizational sponsorship net-

work and job-related human capital development. Data from 188 employees and

their supervisors over a 1-year period showed that, after controlling for employees'

initial levels of career satisfaction and job performance, only job-related human capi-

tal development transmitted the positive effects of organizational embeddedness on

promotion and career satisfaction. Supplemental analyses revealed that organiza-

tional sponsorship network's positive effects on promotion and career satisfaction

were transmitted indirectly, via job-related human capital development. Our findings

illustrate the importance of integrating sponsored and contest mobility perspectives

and contribute to research on organizational embeddedness by extending its out-

comes to include career success within the organization and specifying the process

through which organizational embeddedness is related to career success within the

organization.

KEYWORDS

career success, human capital, organizational embeddedness, organizational sponsorship

1|INTRODUCTION

Mitchell, Holtom, Lee, Sablynski, and Erez (2001) introduced job

embeddedness to elucidate why employees stay in their employing

institutions. According to them, employees are more likely to stay

when they are embedded via links (connections to colleagues and pro-

ject teams), fit (compatibility with job demands and organizational cul-

ture), and sacrifices (perks and advancement opportunities). Almost

two decades of empirical research has demonstrated that job (organi-

zational

1

) embeddedness explains additional variance in turnover and

performance beyond that accounted for by their traditional anteced-

ents (e.g., job attitudes; Holtom, Mitchell, Lee, & Eberly, 2008; Hom,

Lee, Shaw, & Hausknecht, 2017; Jiang, Liu, McKay, Lee, &

Mitchell, 2012). All told, employees embedded in organizations want

to stay and perform more effectively in the organization.

Still, one implication of embeddedness requiring a deeper under-

standing concerns its relationship to career success. Ng and

Feldman (2010a) reasoned that, because organizational

embeddedness (OE) restricts external mobility, it “may hurt, rather

than benefit, an individual's career over time”(p. 696). However, the

construct of career success also encompasses “substantial changes in

work responsibilities, hierarchical levels, or titles within [emphasis

added] an organization”(Feldman & Ng, 2007, p. 352). Precisely

because they want to stay and feel they can stay (Hom, Mitchell,

Lee, & Griffeth, 2012), organizationally embedded employees may

This research was supported by an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant LP0882114.

1

Although the construct was originally labelled “job embeddedness,”it captures both job and

organizational factors in defining and measuring links, fit, and sacrifices (e.g., “My job utilizes

my skills and talents well”,“Ifeel like I am a good match for my organization”; Holtom

et al., 2006). For this reason, some researchers (Ng & Feldman, 2009), including us, refer to it

as organizational embeddedness.

Received: 2 October 2019 Revised: 15 April 2020 Accepted: 21 May 2020

DOI: 10.1002/job.2464

678 © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J Organ Behav. 2020;41:678–693.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job

believe “their career[s] can unfold within the current organization”

(Kraimer, Seibert, Wayne, Liden, & Bravo, 2011, p. 488) and thus,

strive for upward mobility and other career benefits within the organi-

zation. With this in mind, the present investigation focuses on the

relationship between OE and career success within the organization,

which we define and operationalize as the positive work or psycho-

logical outcomes or achievements one accumulates within the current

organization (e.g., Judge, Cable, Boudreau, & Bretz, 1995; Seibert,

Crant, & Kraimer, 1999).

We build upon the contributions of past empirical studies on the

OE–career success link. For instance, Linder (2019) found a positive

relationship between expatriates' OE and their career satisfaction,

while Çakmak-Otluo

glu and Burton (2018) found OE to mediate the

relationship between perceived employability and career satisfaction.

At the dimension level, Stumpf (2014) found fit and sacrifices to relate

positively to career satisfaction. Whereas much can be learned from

these studies, all three focused on the relationship between OE and

career satisfaction and measured these variables at a single point in

time, thus limiting causal inferences. Although Stumpf (2014) showed

the OE dimensions to relate negatively to job, organization, and occu-

pation mobility, his measure of mobility conflated lateral and upward

changes, which may be problematic because lateral and upward

changes differentially relate to antecedents and employees are more

willing to accept upward changes (Ostroff & Clark, 2001). Beyond

these issues, the limited empirical research on the OE–career success

link to date mostly focuses on bivariate associations, precluding an

answer as to how or why OE relates to career success. Overall, the

field lacks a clear understanding of (a) OE's predictive relationship to

career success indicators (particularly objective career success) and

(b) the explanatory mechanisms underlying OE's relationship with

career success.

We begin to address these issues by integrating job

embeddedness theorizing (Hom et al., 2012; Mitchell et al., 2001) with

Turner's (1960) sponsored and contest mobility perspectives.In partic-

ular, we propose that embedded employeeswill be motivated and able

to build their organizational sponsorship network and job-related

human capital, which in turn should relate positively to their career

success within the organization (Eby, Allen, Evans, Ng, &

DuBois, 2008; Miller, Glick, & Cardinal, 2005; Ng, Eby, Sorensen, &

Feldman, 2005; Spurk, Hirschi, & Dries, 2019). Consistent with the

career success literature (e.g., Judge et al., 1995; Ng et al., 2005;

Seibert, Kraimer, Holtom, & Pierotti, 2013),we conceptualize objective

career success (e.g., observable career achievements such as salary

level or number of promotions) as distinct from subjective career suc-

cess (e.g., subjective evaluations of meaningful career outcomes). We

focus here on promotion and careersatisfaction to capture both refer-

ence points. To be consistent with our focus on within-organization

career success, we define promotion as movement to a position of

higher level or a significant increase in responsibility withinthe organi-

zation, and career satisfaction as employees' subjective evaluations of

their career-related achievements within the organization

(e.g., income, hierarchical standing, and level of influence; Seibert

et al., 2013). Organizational sponsorship network refers to the amount

of career mentoring (i.e., exposure and visibility, advice, and coaching)

received from the people in one's organization who act as their men-

tors (Kram, 1983; Seibert, Kraimer, & Liden, 2001), while job-related

human capital development refers to employees'investments in devel-

oping their job relevant knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs; Coff &

Raffiee, 2015). Our hypothesized modelis depicted in Figure 1.

Our study makes two important contributions to the OE litera-

ture. First, by focusing on OE's relationship to promotion and career

satisfaction 1 year later within the organization, we extend our under-

standing of the effects of OE to these important career outcomes.

With respect to career satisfaction, we provide empirical rigor over

previous studies by examining the relationship between OE and

career satisfaction 1 year later, controlling for Time 1 career satisfac-

tion. By examining promotion as an outcome, we expand the criterion

space of OE to outcomes other than career satisfaction, turnover, and

performance. Indeed, on the theoretical basis of embedded incum-

bents' superior motivation to perform and continue acquiring

resources from the organization, OE has been positively associated

with a myriad of performance dimensions (e.g., in-role and extra-role

performance, voice and innovation, and counterproductive behavior;

Lee, Mitchell, Sablynski, Burton, & Holtom, 2004; Ng &

Feldman, 2009, 2013; Kiazad, Kraimer, & Seibert, 2019). Thus, we

control for in-role performance when testing the predictive validity of

OE on promotion to rigorously test this new outcome. Career success

indicators, such as career satisfaction and promotion, are important to

study because they contribute to individuals' self-image and standard

of living (Sullivan & Baruch, 2009) and are vital to an organization's

FIGURE 1 Theoretical model

KIAZAD ET AL.679