The relationship of mentoring and network resources with career success in the Chinese organizational environment

The relationship of mentoring and network resources, the two components of social capital, with career success was investigated in a sample of 113 Chinese white-collar workers. The findings suggested that the prevalence of mentoring in the Chinese workplace is substantially higher than in the Anglo-Saxon workplace, and that Chinese employees do not distinguish their network ties or Guanxi into expressive and instrumental. These results were in line with the presumption that mentoring is an integral part of the Chinese culture and with the view that network ties or Guanxi in the Chinese society cannot exist in a purely instrumental form. In contrast to hypotheses, however, the findings suggest a limited relationship between social capital and career success. In particular, the amount of mentoring, participants reported they had received, was related to their intrinsic career success but not to their extrinsic career success; and the amount of network resources or Guanxi was related neither to extrinsic nor to intrinsic career success. These results were largely at odds with the accumulated knowledge on the benefits of social capital for career success. The findings are discussed with respect to the changing nature of the Chinese business and organizational environment, and their implications for human resource practices.     

Exploring the moderating effect of gender in the relationship between individuals' aspirations and career success among engineers in Peru

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to analyse the relationship between career success and individual career aspirations for engineers, and to test whether this differs according to gender. The primary hypothesis in this research is that gender does make a significant difference.

Design/methodological/approach: The sample consists of 1011 engineers who graduated from a prestigious Peruvian college between 1998 and 2005. Female graduates constituted only 4% of the sample, which is similar to the national statistics for engineers in Peru during this period. The relationships were primarily tested using multiple regression and structural equation modelling analyses.

Findings: Findings show a positive relationship between individual career aspirations and career success for men, but not necessarily for women; this supports the hypothesis that gender moderates this relationship. Females seek more secure career orientation than their male counterparts. In addition, females have shown that their career success is more related to feminine themes such as achieving ‘work–family balance’. The findings are in line with previously published results in other countries in which female engineers have career orientations with a preference for a balance between work and family as well as work stability.

Research limitations/implications: The sample is limited to graduates from a single Peruvian college of engineering. Although the sample has similar demographic characteristic to a national population, a more heterogeneous sample is called for in a future research. Moreover, additional moderators should be incorporated, such as family background, residency (large urban cities vs. small villages) and perhaps other variables.

Practical implications: Results can help Human Resource Managers to design better career plans, which consider gender in defining policies for the attraction and retention of competent female engineers.     

Job stressors and voluntary work behaviours: mediating effect of emotion and moderating roles of personality and emotional intelligence

Framed within an emotion‐centred model, the current study investigated the mediating role of negative and positive emotion between job stressors and counterproductive work behaviours (CWB) and organisational citizenship behaviours, and the moderating effects of personality and ability‐based emotional intelligence (EI) on the relationships between job stressors and emotions. Results from a sample of 202 Caribbean employees across eight public and private sector organisations showed that both positive and negative emotion mediated the relation between job stressors and citizenship behaviours, whereas only negative emotion was found to mediate the relation between job stressors and CWB. Some support was found for the moderating effects of personality and EI. Implications for research and practice are discussed.