Entrepreneurship, professionalism, leadership : a framework and measure for understanding boundaryless careers

By Kim-Yin Chan, Moon-ho Ringo Ho, O. Chernyshenko, Olwen Bedford, Marilyn A. Uy, David Gomulya, Yoke-Loo Sam, W. M. J. Phan. 2012

109 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We propose a person-centered framework for conceptualizing subjective careers in an increasingly boundaryless work context. Specifically, we argue that entrepreneurship, professionalism, and leadership (EPL) can serve as three key dimensions of subjective career space. We relate this framework to earlier macro-level national and organizational career models proposed by Kanter (1989) and Schein (1978). Our empirical study involving 10,326 Singaporean university students demonstrated that entrepreneurial, professional, and leadership career aspirations (including motivations, efficacies, and intentions) can be measured independently, that these career dimensions are independent of vocational interests, and that they are to some degree viewed as competing career alternatives. We also show that EPL motivation profiles can operationalize the boundaryless and protean career concepts. Individuals concurrently high in entrepreneurial, professional, and leadership career motivations, and those high in entrepreneurial and leadership motivations are highest in boundaryless and self-directed career attitudes, while those primarily motivated for professional careers hold the most traditional career attitudes. We conclude by discussing the potential of the framework for understanding human resource issues at organizational and national levels and for enhancing the study of entrepreneurship, professionalism, and leadership.

Subfields: Education, Management of Technology and Innovation, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4ff898868f3b13c76ea07e029d862ec0fcece14f

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In Education

In Management of Technology and Innovation

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

Citations in the corpus

Proactivity, adaptability and boundaryless career attitudes: The mediating role of entrepreneurial alertness (2015, background): “We did not explicitly hypothesize for organizational mobility preference because our participants are students who have insufficient work experience (cf. Chan et al., 2012).”
Protean Careers at Work: Self-Direction and Values Orientation in Psychological Success (2018, background): “For example, some researchers in non-Western cultures have found that the values-orientation dimension did not emerge cleanly (Chan et al. 2012), and two additional scale validation articles found that the values-orientation dimension fit best when split into two further factors: moral behavior and…”
Contemporary career orientations and career self-management: A review and integration (2021, background): “However, in traditional professional contexts, traditional career orientations tend to be associated with higher performance (Chan et al., 2012).”
The development and validation of a measure for protean career orientation (2014, background): “Furthermore, subsequent research could not always confirm the proposed two-factorial structure of the measure because the values-driven scale emerged to be problematic in non-US samples (Chan et al. 2012).”