Career orientations of self-leaders

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges for organizations that is brought about by current business conditions and change is the requirement of being adaptive and lateral. Organizations that cannot cope with change cannot survive. In this respect, employees have become one of the most cruical and key elements for organizations. With today’s prominent concepts such as delegation, empowerment, participation in decision making, it is possible to utilize every employee and become more lateral. Self-leadership is a concept that has emerged in line with this trend and has deepened this notion. Self-leadership claims that it is possible for employees to manage themselves without requiring external supervision when provided with the necessary means and to reach personal and organizational goals. Nowadays, for an effective and fast operation, organizations need this kind of individuals. Employees who have high self-leadership skills play a crucial role for organizations to reach high performance without verticalization. In this study, it is aimed to reveal the career orientations of employees who are high on self-leadership levels. In this respect, via data from 126 employees working in services sector, the protean and boundaryless career attitudes and preferences of individuals who are high on self-leadership have been investigated. Within the protean career, self-directed career orientations and valuesdriven career orientations, and under the boundaryless career, boundaryless mindsets and organizational mobility preferences of employees are investigated. As a result, it is observed that both protean and boundaryless career attitudes of individuals high on self-leadership are more compared to other individuals. As a striking result, it is seen that the organizational mobility preferences of these individuals are low and even though they have boundaryless mindsets, their attitudes towards interorganizational mobility is negative.