Protean Career Orientation’s Impact On Work Life Balance: Studying Employability and Person Organization Fit as Mediators

Abstract

The current thesis studied four constructs including Protean Career Orientation (PCO), Person Organization fit (POF), Employability and Work Life Balance (WLB). The study included seven hypothesizes, five direct paths and two indirect paths (mediation effect). The relationship of PCO with employability, POF and WLB was studied. Apart from that employability and POF were studied as mediators between PCO and WLB. The research contributed to the extant literature by studying Person Organization Fit (POF) and Employability as mediators between the relationship of PCO and WLB. Also, PCO was studied with, POF (work and career related outcome) for the first time. The hypotheses were tested by adopting a quantitative research strategy. Survey method was used and a total of 352 responses were collected from employees working in the telecommunication industry in Lahore, Pakistan. 300 questionnaires were considered usable with 85% response rate. SPSS and AMOS software’s were used in the study. CFA depicted that the model was fit and all constructs being studied hold reliability and validity. SEM results depicted that Protean Career Orientation had a positive and significant (β = 0.144, p < 0.05) relation with Work life balance, which is considered as the total effect without adding mediators in the relationship. The results also showed that PCO had a positive and significant relation with employability (β = 0.14, p < 0.05) and POF (β = 0.24, p < 0.05). The four direct paths were significant and H1, H2, H5 and H6 were accepted. The indirect paths were tested with the help of bootstrap in process SPSS software for the purpose of analyzing the indirect effect of both mediators. Employability did not mediate the relationship of PCO and WLB, hence “direct only” relationship existed (Zhao, Lynch & Chen, 2010). On the other hand, POF partially mediated the relationship of PCO and WLB, hence “complementary mediation” exists (Zhao, Lynch & Chen, 2010). The significance of the indirect effect (a x b) was tested by considering the confidence interval in the bootstrap analysis. Overall, the results depicted that employability does not mediate the relationship between PCO and WLB whereas Person organization fit partially mediates the relationship between PCO and WLB.