Exploring Boundaryless Careerists Inside Organizations: The Role of Job Crafting and Work Engagement to Subjective Career Success

Abstract

Numerous studies have explored the relationship between employees’ boundaryless career attitudes and career-related outcomes; however, it remains uncertain whether these employees truly perceive career success by working in their current organizations. Drawing from self-determination theory, we propose that employees with boundaryless career attitudes enhance work engagement, which leads to subjective career success through job crafting. We examined the hypotheses using structural equation modeling, with data from 493 Korean employees. The analyses revealed that a boundaryless mindset predicts heightened subjective career success through job crafting and work engagement, whereas organizational mobility preference did not. These results imply that managers should consider employees’ boundaryless career attitudes and make the best use of them by facilitating employee job crafting behavior. Additionally, we explored the contingent effect of perceived organizational support that can impact the degree of employee job crafting behavior. Further contributions and future research agendas are discussed.