Conceptualizing and Measuring Subjective Career Lock

Otto Pankkonen; Marjaana Pöyry

doi:10.16993/sjwop.250

Conceptualizing and Measuring Subjective Career Lock

Scandinavian Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology

Volume 9 (2024): Issue 1

By: Otto Pankkonen and Marjaana Pöyry

Open Access

|Nov 2024

Abstract

In today’s rapidly changing working life, employees may end up in career lock, that is, not satisfied with their jobs but unable to change their career situation. Being in career lock has shown to have detrimental effects on employees, but so far, it has been difficult to measure and identify individual perceptions of it. Our aim was to construct and validate a scale for measuring subjective career lock (SCL). We expected SCL to be closely related to various occupational health outcomes. We defined SCL as a psychological state in which individuals have an internal sense of being stuck in their careers. We constructed a three-item scale to measure this phenomenon, refining the measures of prior career lock constructs. For scale validation, we conducted an online survey of employees (N = 3,281) whom we contacted via four trade unions in Finland. The results showed that SCL is related to yet a construct distinct from job dissatisfaction and inability to change one’s career situation and demonstrated satisfactory nomological and discriminant validity with related constructs. The SCL scale demonstrated good incremental validity and added a unique variance to the estimation of occupational health and well-being outcomes over prior measures of locked-in.

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Articles in this issue

DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/sjwop.250 | Journal eISSN: 2002-2867

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Language: English

Page range: 10 - 10

Submitted on: Sep 25, 2023

Accepted on: Nov 8, 2024

Published on: Nov 20, 2024

Published by: Stockholm University Press

In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services

Keywords:

subjective career lock,

scale development,

occupational well-being

© 2024 Otto Pankkonen, Marjaana Pöyry, published by Stockholm University Press
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Volume 9 (2024): Issue 1