Proactive career support and employee thriving: The mediating role of job content plateau and the moderating role of political skill

Abstract

Despite the growing empirical research on how work contexts enable employees to thrive, the majority focuses on employee's proximal, local work units. This study explores how and when contextual factors beyond local work environments affect employee thriving. Based on the socially embedded model of thriving, we posit that proactive career support implemented by the organization, as a factor featured in larger organizational contexts, fosters thriving via reducing job content plateau. We further contend that employees' political skill strengthens this role of proactive career support. As expected, our three-wave data demonstrates a positive indirect effect of the organization's proactive career support on thriving as mediated by job content plateau. For employees with stronger political skill, proactive career support is more likely to reduce job content plateau and, consequently, promotes employee thriving. From a practitioner perspective, these findings shed light on the importance of organizations' proactive career support in contributing to a thriving workforce, as well as when the benefits of this support can be enlarged.