The influence of familyresponsibilities, career fields and

gender on career successAn empirical study

Wolfgang MayrhoferInterdisciplinary Unit of Management and Organisational Behaviour,

Wirtschaftsuniversitat Wien, Vienna, Austria

Michael MeyerUnit of Nonprofit Management, Wirtschaftsuniversitat Wien, Vienna, Austria

Michael SchiffingerInterdisciplinary Unit of Management and Organisational Behaviour,

Wirtschaftsuniversitat Wien, Vienna, Austria, and

Angelika SchmidtInstitute of Change Management and Management Development,

Wirtschaftsuniversitat Wien, Vienna, Austria

Abstract

Purpose – The paper seeks to analyze empirically the consequences of family responsibilities forcareer success and the influence of career context variables and gender on this relationship.

Design/methodology/approach – The sample consists of 305 business school graduates (52percent male) from a major Central European university who finished their studies around 2000 andwho were in their early career stages (i.e. third and fourth career years).

Findings – The paper reports a negative relationship between family responsibilities and objectiveand subjective career success via work centrality. There is also substantive support for the effect ofcontextual factors on the relationship between family situations and career success, emphasizing theimportance of a multi-level perspective. Finally, evidence of gender effects exists.

Research limitations/implications – The empirical generalizability of the results is limited by thestructure of the sample. Qualitative in-depth studies are needed to further understand the relationshipsfound.

Practical implications – The results underscore the importance of the work-family-interface foremployee retention measures. Tailored HR policies are crucial.

Originality/value – Theoretically, the paper develops a multi-level causal model of specific aspectsof work-family relations including variables ranging from meso (career context) to more micro (family,individual). Empirically, the study focuses on young business professionals prior to having a family orin the early stages of their family life.

Keywords Sociology of work, Family, Careers, Gender

Paper type Research paper

IntroductionWork-family relations are central to individuals, organizations and policy makers. Forindividuals, they relate to issues such as life satisfaction, work-life balance, or career

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at

www.emeraldinsight.com/0268-3946.htm

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Received April 2007Revised December 2007Accepted December 2007

Journal of Managerial PsychologyVol. 23 No. 3, 2008pp. 292-323q Emerald Group Publishing Limited0268-3946DOI 10.1108/02683940810861392

success (e.g. Greenhaus et al., 2003; Kirchmeyer, 2006; Ford et al., 2007). Fororganizations, work-family relations touch on individual and organizationalperformance, scope of flexibility in terms of work capacity or organizationalprograms allowing employees to better combine private and occupational demands(e.g. Hall, 1990; Osterman, 1995; Kossek and Lambert, 2005). For policy makers, theylead to policies such as regulations about better combining family life with paid work,support for individuals re-entering work life after familial leaves of absence orlegislative frameworks for working time and conditions (e.g. Esping-Andersen, 2000;Poelmans and Sahibzada, 2004).

Overall, results of the substantial body of work-family studies are quite sobering.While a wide range of views exists, it seems fair to say that far more suggest a negativespillover in terms of work-family conflict than the other way round, i.e. that work andfamily can positively influence one another (see, for example, Eby et al., 2005). Inaddition, some aspects of this relationship are clearly less researched. Among them is,first, the context of work careers. Work-family relations are frequently analyzedwithout relating them to the specific career context relevant to individuals. While themacro-context of legal regulations, population demography or economic developmentis regularly taken into account (e.g. Poelmans and Sahibzada, 2004), the importance ofthe specific career context, i.e. factors such as characteristics of the profession or thekind of careers individuals are pursuing, is less acknowledged (for notable exceptionssee, for example, Greenhaus et al., 2001; Perry-Smith and Blum, 2000). Second, theimportance of gender for work-family relations is not yet fully developed. While agender perspective is prominent in work-family and career research and many resultspoint towards gender based differences in family relations and work careers, calls formore fine-grained analyses of different aspects of gender effects abound (e.g. Higgenset al., 2000; Stoner et al., 1990).

The current paper responds to these deficits by taking up a classical issue ofwork-family studies – effects of the family situation on careers, analyzing here theeffects of family responsibilities on career success – and developing it further throughtwo differentiations cutting across various levels of analysis: first, by analyzing theeffects in different types of career contexts, and second by differentiating along thegender dimension. Specifically, this paper addresses three major questions:

(1) What effects do individuals’ family responsibilities have on their objective andsubjective career success?

(2) How do core characteristics of individuals’ career context influence theseeffects?

(3) Are these effects different for men and women?

In answering these questions, the current paper proposes a causal model with cruciallinkages between family responsibility (family level), career context (meso-level) andcareer success (individual level). Using a sample of young business professionals, thepaper investigates empirically the proposed relationships using partial least squaresanalyses. The paper contributes to the theoretical as well as empirical advancement ofthe field. Regarding the former, the paper further develops specific aspects ofwork-family relations, presents a model based on current literature and includesvariables from different conceptual levels ranging from meso (career context) to moremicro (family, individual). Empirically, the study focuses on a specific group: young

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business professionals prior to having a family or in the early stages of their family life.Thus, insight into this specific group, which is important for many businesses, isgenerated and possible generalizations are discussed.

Conceptual backgroundResearch on the work-family interface, careers and the importance of work providesessential insight into the link between family responsibilities and career outcomes. Itpoints towards the importance of work centrality as a key linking factor andemphasizes gender as a differentiating variable.

Work-family interfaceThe past decades have seen the emergence of new configurations of “work and family”with more women in the labor force and more dual-earner families (Tharenou, 1999).Dual-earner households are supplying more working hours to the labor market thanever before (Edwards and Wajcman, 2005, p. 47). In the last 50 years partnership ideashave changed for both men and women (Jacobs and Gerson, 2001; Erler, 1996; Peuckert,1996; Herlth et al., 1994; Kaufmann, 1990). From the perspective of the earlytwenty-first century in industrialized countries, fertility is a choice variable andcohabitation, separation and divorce are commonplace. Because of these changing andseparating views of roles, the supporting activities of (female) partners can no longerbe taken for granted. The forms of partnerships and families have differentiated(Schmidt, 2001): rather traditional forms (living together in the same household with orwithout marriage), couples living and working in various locations (so calledcommuters or long-distance marriages), or couples living in the same area but whohave decided to have separate households (so called living apart together couples).Within all these forms we can find various constellations with no child, one child ormore children. In addition, it varies whether the children are living with their biologicalparents or not (patchwork families or stepfamilies). Parental demands are a function ofthe number and ages of the children, and the age of the youngest child (Voydanoff,1988; Lewis and Cooper, 1987; Greenhaus and Parasuraman, 1986). They are highestfor persons with infants and pre-school children, lower for those with school-agechildren, and lowest for those with adult children not living at home (Osherson andDill, 1983).

Family involvement refers to the importance of the family to an individual and theextent of psychological investment in the family. As in the case of job involvement,family involvement is likely to generate internal pressures to invest increased effortand energy in the family domain to fulfill family role demands (Parasuraman andSimmers, 2001, p. 555). Beside the number of children, the work life of the partners andtheir career orientations (e.g. single breadwinner orientation versus dual earningconstellations or dual career couples) are important factors influencing the form offamily responsibility (e.g. Blossfeld and Drobnic, 2001; Lewis and Cooper, 1987).Models of the family concern the allocation of roles and responsibilities, rolespecialization and the division of labor among adult family members (Hakim, 2005,p. 56).

Numerous studies have examined characteristics of the family domain as predictorsof work-family conflict. Most of the research at least implicitly assumes thatwork-family conflict negatively affects the psychic and physical condition ofindividuals and their enjoyment of work and life. As a consequence, disadvantages for

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companies may result because of reduced productivity and increased turnover(Greenhaus et al., 2001; Cooper and Williams, 1994; Ganster and Schaubroeck, 1991).These studies have found that conflict is higher among those who:

. have children at home (Behson, 2002; Carlson, 1999);

. are concerned or troubled about child care (e.g. Fox and Dwyer, 1999);

. have greater time demands from family (e.g. Parasuraman and Simmers, 2001);

. have disagreements with their family or partner (e.g. Day and Chamberlain,2006; Williams and Alliger, 1994); and

. have less family support (Grzywacz and Marks, 2000).

Family responsibilities are one important factor influencing the amount of time andenergy that individuals are able and willing to devote to work. Consistent withgender-based normative expectations, women still generally bear primaryresponsibility for home maintenance and childcare irrespective of their employmentstatus. Although employed married women spend less time on housework andchildcare than non-employed women, they devote considerably more time to home andfamily in fulfilling their family role responsibilities than men (Parasuraman andSimmers, 2001; Pleck, 1985). Researchers have argued that in a workforce that isincreasingly composed of individuals in “post-traditional families”, work-familyconflict may have a significant impact on how individuals view their career outcomes(Kirchmeyer, 2006; Schneer and Reitman, 2002). Under conditions of new “protean”careers (Hall, 1996), self-employment and increasingly flexible employment contracts,work-family conflict has not become obsolete. On the contrary, the demands are evenhigher for the self-employed (Jennings and McDougald, 2007; Parasuraman andSimmers, 2001; Loscocco, 1997).

Characteristics of the work context are important predictors for work-familyconflict, too. In particular, work variability (Fox and Dwyer, 1999) and forms ofworking hours such as working weekends (Schneider, 2005) are related to higherconflict. Conflict seems to be higher among those who work a greater number of hours(Grzywacz and Marks, 2000; Carlson and Perrewe, 1999; Greenhaus et al., 1987). Thisindicates that the work and career contexts of individuals (i.e. factors such as demandsand pressures from work, degree of turbulence, etc.) constitute important influencingfactors when analyzing the effects of family situations on career success.

CareersCareer success. Career success is an integral part of career research (for a recentoverview, see, for example, Gunz and Heslin, 2005). Despite the huge body of literatureon factors influencing career success, little scholarly attention has been devoted toanalyzing the concept of career success itself (Greenhaus, 2003; Heslin, 2003; Sturges,1999). One framework that is widely accepted in career research is Hughes’s (1937,1951) distinction between objective and subjective career success. The former isdefined as directly observable, measurable, and verifiable by an impartial third partywhen looking at attainments such as pay, promotions, or occupational status. Thelatter is only experienced directly by the person and defined by an individual’sreactions to his or her unfolding career experiences (Hughes, 1937, 1951). It heavilydepends on individuals’ (re)construction of career success according to subjective and

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individualized patterns. Objective and subjective views on careers constitute a“two-sidedness” inherent in the career concept. The subjective-objective career dualityexpresses these two dimensions as unique, empirically distinct constructs (Arthur et al.,2005) showing different patterns of correlations with commonly used predictorvariables (Ng et al., 2005). Arthur and Rousseau (1996) found that more than 75 per centof the career-related articles published in major interdisciplinary journals between1980 and 1994 focused on objective perspectives. Over the last decade, however,subjective criteria have increasingly been adopted (see, for example, the literaturereview by Arthur et al., 2005).

Importance of career context. Work careers are embedded in the broader economicand institutional environment. In career terms, contributions from labor economics aswell as sociology for a long time have specifically dealt with issues like labor marketsegmentation, stratification and dual labor markets (Tolbert, 1982; Edwards, 1975; Piore,1975; Doeringer and Piore, 1971) and their relationship to various aspects of careers,especially earnings/wages (Theodossiou, 1995) and mobility (Bernhardt et al., 2001). Thecareer literature in the more narrow sense takes a more restricted and a greatly diverseperspective. It includes contributions such as the specific characteristics of occupationsand their labor market consequences (Tolbert, 1996) or the analysis of specific aspectssuch as the dual labor market hypothesis (Leontaridi, 2002).

Based on the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (e.g. Bourdieu, 1977),Iellatchitch et al. (2003) present a field and habitus perspective of careers emphasizingthe role of the context for individual careers. For Bourdieu, a social field is a patternedset of practices. In this playground various actors with a field-relevant capital try toadvance their position by following individual strategies. Careers as the sequence ofpositions influenced by work related individual efforts are not a field, but unfold withina field. These career fields are the social context within which individual members ofthe work force make their moves. Individuals try to maintain or improve their place inthe given and unfolding network of work related positions through their field-relevantcareer capital and a patterned set of practices. The latter are constrained by their careercapital and the rules of the field and, in turn, contribute to the shaping of these rules.Career fields can be differentiated along two core dimensions. Coupling focuses on thecloseness of relationships and the degree of mutual influence between the focal actorand the other actor(s) in the field. Configuration focuses on changes in theconfiguration of relationships between the focal actors and other relevant actors over alonger period of time.

Importance of workWork is an important activity for individuals. Particularly in industrialized societies,work is not only a means of survival, but also a major way of expressing anddeveloping oneself and a source of social recognition. Hinting at the importance ofwork for individuals (Harpaz, 1986), work centrality is conceptualized and measured inthree major ways:

(1) as a set of integrated and interrelated beliefs;

(2) as individuals’ preference in terms of work; and

(3) as related to central life interests (i.e. the attachment and commitment to workin general; Pryor and Davies, 1989).

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Compared to job involvement (i.e. the extent of preoccupation and immersion in presentjobs; Paullay et al., 1994) and organizational centrality (i.e. the extent to which anemployee is integrated into the network of interpersonal relationships within the worksystem; (O’Hara et al., 1994), work centrality is the broader concept (Diefendorff et al.,2002).

Work centrality is related to a number of outcomes at the individual level. Thisincludes a positive relationship on career outcome variables such as organizationalcommitment, career planning, and wages (Mannheim et al., 1997), the hours spent onwork (Snir and Harpaz, 2006), attitudes and job performance (Peterson andRuiz-Quintanilla, 2003), workaholism (Harpaz and Snir, 2003), job satisfaction andparticipation in decision making (Kanungo, 1982), and job tenure (Dubin et al., 1975).Gender plays an important role when analyzing the effects of work centrality. Researchindicates that gender moderates some of the effects, e.g. in the area of job involvementand organizational citizenship behavior (Diefendorff et al., 2002), workaholism (Harpazand Snir, 2003) or determining factors of work centrality such as socio-economic status,work values or socialization (Mannheim, 1993).

A causal model: family responsibility, career fields and career successBased on the research outlined briefly above, the following issues related to the threeresearch questions emerge. From the discussion about the importance of work, workcentrality evolves as crucial construct. Hence, this variable plays a central role in thecausal model as a “linking pin” between the contextual variables, i.e. the family andwork situation, and individual career outcome variables. The literature on thework-family interface points towards family responsibility as a core variable whenlooking at effects of the family situation on career success. It influences – among otherthings – the amount of time and energy that individuals are able and willing to devoteto work, i.e. their work centrality. In turn, work centrality is an important factor forboth objective and subjective career success. Research on career success clearly pointstowards these two distinctive dimensions of career success with objective careerssuccess influencing subjective success. Also stemming from the extant career literatureand belonging to the more confined work on career context (for an overview seeMayrhofer et al., 2007) are the core characteristics of the respective career fields. Inparticular, changeability and job alternatives directly influence work centrality. Inaddition, changeability has a moderating effect on the link between familyresponsibility and work centrality. Fourth, gender as a major “cross-sectional”phenomenon has an effect on the link between family responsibilities and workcentrality. Hence, we propose a model linking three conceptual levels (i.e. individual,family, and career context) and relating the central variables of our research (i.e. familyresponsibility, work centrality, career fields and career success) to each other (seeFigure 1). It is explained in more detail below.

Family responsibility and its effectsA overview of the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and WorkingConditions (2003, p. 48) showed that on average across 16 European countries, menwould prefer to work a 36.5-hour week and women a 30-hour week. Familyresponsibilities are the main reason mentioned for this interest in reducing actualworking hours. Therefore, family responsibilities and the wish or need for other

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working time arrangements reduce the perceived job alternatives. In addition, agrowing expectation of mobility exists (Schneider, 2005). Jobs in high qualificationsegments are especially linked with a growing amount of business travel (see, forexample, Harris et al., 2005). Hence, family responsibilities reduce the number of jobsavailable.

The assumption that workers can choose the amount of overall working hoursfreely is only partly correct. Boheim and Taylor (2004) state that rigidities in the labormarket still remain especially for jobs with flexible work hours.

Family responsibilities also influence the importance of work. Family status hasbeen found to play an important role in individuals work experiences (e.g. Stroh et al.,1996; Tharenou et al., 1994; Schneer and Reitman, 1993). Resources such as time,attention, and energy are finite, and those expended in one domain are unavailable forother domains. This constraint yields a negative direct relationship between familyand work resources available for the other domain (Edwards and Rothbard, 2000).

Gender plays an important role for the work related effects of familyresponsibilities. Gendered roles affect the conditions and consequences of thework-family conflict (Carlson and Kacmar, 2000). Women’s job satisfaction depends onfamily member’s emotional state (King et al., 1995), and the determinants of jobsatisfaction change essentially after the birth of a child (Holtzman and Glass, 1999).The presence of children, the employment status of one’s partner, the form ofpartnership and household – all these factors influence the perception of job centralityand have negative effects on the experienced work centrality. In particular, femalemanagers who experienced high levels of family role salience and long work hours(also) experienced the highest of work-family conflict (Stoner et al., 1990).

Figure 1.Family responsibility,career fields and careersuccess: a causal model

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Career fields and work centralityAs mentioned above, we focus on two characteristics of career fields:

(1) job alternatives constitute a core indicator for tight/loose coupling: the fewer jobalternatives an actor has in their evoked set, the tighter coupled they are (e.g.with an employer) and the more the current work situation is in danger of beinga dead-end position; and

(2) changeability of both work content and professional relationships represent thedimension of configuration.

Prior research is barely sufficient to profoundly assess the impact of both dimensionsof career fields on work centrality. However, there are some results on related issues.Increasing dynamics generated new forms of vocational identities, especially “newcareer negotiators” in the telecommunications industry (Dif, 2004), which indicates ahigher importance of job-related issues. Within a sample of technical contractors, amajority worked longer hours and rarely scheduled their time in a flexible way despiteconditions of new temporal flexibility and dynamics (Evans et al., 2004). Severalscholars argue that increasing flexibility and changeability of work conditions do notindispose the importance of psychological contracts (Marsden, 2004; McGovern et al.,1996). New contracts might imply higher work centrality. As changeability isconcerned, we assume that actors within a more turbulent work context tend towards ahigher work centrality, as these situations command more attention than stable onesand attract more time and energy, detracting it from the leisure and family sphere. Ingeneral, we suppose that the overall relationship between changeability and workcentrality has an inverse U-shape. However, our sample does not reach the point whereturbulence at work detracts attention. Thus, we assume a positive relation.

The same direction of relationship is assumed for job alternatives and workcentrality: the more alternatives actors have and/or perceive to have in labor marketsand career fields, the more important work will get for them and the more hours theywill work. Having alternatives and opportunities is a clear indicator of an individual’svalue and position on labor markets, thus strengthening work-specific self-efficacy andself confidence. Contrarily, a loss of career perspectives and job alternatives results inlocked-in effects (van Ours, 2004), thus reducing not only job search activities, but alsowork centrality and job-involvement.

This direction of impact is not supported by economic research, which shows acountercyclical characteristic of working hours and vacation time (e.g. Altonji andUsui, 2007) and negative impacts of labor market rigidities on individually preferredreduction of working hours (Boheim and Taylor, 2004). For our sample of youngbusiness professionals, we nevertheless assume that the first effect is stronger than thelatter. At least in early career phases we assume a strong reinforcing cycle between theperceptions of one’s professional attractiveness and an actor’s investment of time andenergy into work (success to the successful; Senge, 1990, Appendix 2).

Work centrality and career successWork centrality is positively related to both dimensions of career success. For objectivecareer success, research suggests that the time and energy devoted to work haspositive effects on career outcomes such as income or hierarchical advancement (see,for example, Mannheim et al., 1997; for similar effects of job involvement see, for

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example, Rottenberry and Moberg, 2007). For subjective career success, a positive linkto work centrality can be assumed, too. From a dissonance theoretical point of view(Festinger, 1959) it is highly probable that the degree of investment of time and energyinto work positively relates to subjective impressions of being successful. In order toavoid cognitive dissonance, individuals putting a lot of emphasis on work are underinternal pressure to see their work involvement and outcomes more positively thanpersons where work plays a lesser role.

Objective and subjective career successVarious possibilities of influencing directions between objective and subjective careersuccess have been formulated. Most frequently it is assumed that objective success hasa positive influence on subjective success (e.g. Korman et al., 1981) since individualsinterpret their subjective success on the basis of their objective accomplishments(Judge et al., 1995). In their review, Arthur et al. (2005) also identify studies consideringa two-way interdependence between the two dimensions of career success. Individualsconstantly interpret and reinterpret the work experience and career success they havehad. They experience certain levels of objective success, create understandings aboutwhat constitutes career success for them and individually act on those understandings.Empirically unfolding as a moderate correlation between the two (Ng et al., 2005), theirrelationship stays a complex one (Nicholson and DeWaal-Andrews, 2005, p. 142).

Sample, variables and methodsData collection and sampleThe data for this study were collected via questionnaire during the 2004 and 2005follow-up surveys of a panel study started in 2000. The sample consists of 305 businessschool graduates (52 percent male) from a major Central European university whofinished their studies around 2000. The data roughly cover the participants’ third andfourth career year – still the career entry stage, but not the immediate beginning. Themean sample age is 32.2 years (women: 31:7^ 2:8; men: 32:8^ 2:4). Concerning ageand gender distribution, the sample is representative for the graduates of the wholeuniversity at the time, which supplies roughly half the national market for businessschool graduates. As to marital status and number of children, 33 percent/30 percentwere single in the first and second survey round, respectively; 11 percent/7 percentlived in separate households, 29 percent/29 percent lived in a shared household, and 27percent/32 percent were married. Regarding the number of children, there wasvirtually no difference between the survey rounds: 83 percent had no child, 11 percenthad one child, and the remaining 6 percent had two or more children. Although this lowpercentage of parents seems quite normal for a sample of young businessprofessionals, it makes for an extremely skewed distribution. Still, this should notdistort the results, as the method employed (see below) is quite robust against skeweddata (Cassel et al., 1999) and the chosen index for family responsibility (see “Measures”section) actually has very moderate skewness values (0.27 and 0.09 for the first andsecond survey rounds, respectively). The inclusion of other forms of familyresponsibilities such as elder care would have been beneficial. Unfortunately, nosystematic data was available in this respect.

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MethodsWe analyzed our data with a partial least squares (PLS) procedure (e.g. Chin, 1998;Lohmoeller, 1989; Wold, 1975), which allows structural modeling with latent variablesbut has less strict assumptions than “traditional” covariance-based structural equationmodeling (LISREL approach) concerning sample size, level of measurement, andmultinormality (Fornell and Bookstein, 1982, p. 440). As in LISREL, the completemodel consists of two components:

(1) the measurement (or outer) model where the observed variables form the latentvariables; and

(2) the structural (or inner) model, which deals with the relationships between thelatent variables (e.g. Tenenhaus et al., 2005, p. 161).

An evaluation of these two model components for this study is presented in the“Results” section. The PLS calculations were conducted with SmartPLS 2.0 (Ringleet al., 2005); all other calculations, including standardizing the variables beforeconducting the PLS analyses, were done with SPSS. Standardization was especiallyrelevant for including the interaction term (Chin et al., 1996, p. 26), with changeabilitysupposed to moderate the effect of family responsibility on work centrality.

The significance of the path coefficients was determined using a bootstrapprocedure (e.g. Chin, 1998) with 500 subsamples. Gender differences were tested forstatistical significance by calculating t-values, using a formula proposed by Chin (2000)(see also Sanchez-Franco, 2006, p. 30; Keil et al., 2000, p. 315), i.e.:

t ¼PCwomen 2 PCmenffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi

ðm21Þ2

ðmþn22Þ £ SE2women þ

ðn21Þ2

ðmþn22Þ £ SE2men

q� �£

ffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi1mþ 1

n

q� � ;

where m and n are the number of men and women in the sample, respectively, PC is thepath coefficient and SE is the standard error of the path in the structural model.

Although PLS allows formative as well as reflective measures (Sanchez-Franco,2006, p. 26; for a detailed discussion of reflective/formative measures, see, for example,Jarvis et al., 2003) and especially family responsibility basically suggests a formativeapproach, our variables do not cover the range of relevant indicators for this variable,such as the partner’s professional status and/or career/family orientation, or availablesocial support (see above). As sound formative measurement requests that all relevantindicators be included (Bollen and Lennox, 1991, p. 307), we chose reflectivemeasurement models throughout.

MeasuresThe following variables from both survey rounds were entered into the model asindicators of the latent variables. For family responsibility, the available data were thenumber of children and marital status (single, with partner/separate households, withpartner/shared household, married). Based on the reasoning that being single withoutchildren usually means less family responsibility than living in partnership and theassumption that family responsibilities increase when one has to take care of children,the following scheme was applied to quantify family responsibility: for participantswithout children, being single scored 0, a partner living in a separate household scored

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1, a shared household or being married scored 2. For participants with children, thesame marital statuses scored 4, 3, and 2, respectively, with the number of childrenbeing added to the score. For example, this leads to the following scores: single, nochild: 0; married, no child: 2; married, one child: 3; married, two children: 4; singleparent, one child: 5.

Basically, the children’s age arguably plays an important role for the familyresponsibility, too. However, in the latter of the two follow-up surveys one year ago, themean age of the children was 2.4 years (^2.1 years). As all children of our sample arestill in pre-adolescence infanthood, we did not include the children’s age in ouranalyses. Furthermore, all children lived in the participants’ households, which is whythere was no need to differentiate between children living in the household andchildren living elsewhere in the analyses.

In a related vein, family responsibility may include duties like elder care, obligationstowards “chosen” family members, or community responsibilities, which are notincluded in our study owing to omission of these data in the survey. Although this isadmittedly a minor drawback for this topic, we assume that marital status andchildcare are by far the most important determinants of family responsibility,especially for our sample.

Career changeability was measured with two items:

(1) instability of work content (11-point scale ranging from “very stable” to“ever-changing”); and

(2) instability of professional relations (same scaling).

Perceived job alternatives were measured by the question how easily another adequatejob could be found should the need arise (11-point scale from “not at all” to “veryeasily”). Work centrality was measured by focusing on behavior/output related as wellas attitudinal aspects. For the former, we used reported actual work hours per week; forthe latter, we used the proportion of “life energy” invested in the job (11-point scaleranging from 0 percent to 100 percent). Subjective career success was measured by tworatings:

(1) career satisfaction (11-point scale ranging from “extremely dissatisfied” to“extremely satisfied”); and

(2) perceived career success (11-point scale ranging from “totally unsuccessful” to“extremely successful”).

Objective career success was measured by the reported annual income and theperceived amount of managerial/leadership-related tasks in the job (11-point scaleranging from 0 percent to 100 percent).

Despite a sometimes fierce discussion about the use of objective and subjectivesuccess measures in organizational research (for firm performance see, for example,Wall et al., 2004) and the frequent use of perceptional measures in career research, itcertainly has its limits. Hence, some additional analyses were conducted in order to seewhether single-source biases can be detected. Table I shows the correlation matrix forall variables. It indicates no irregularities pointing towards problems with thevariables. The fact that all these variables were collected via a self-report questionnaireraises the issue of single-source bias (e.g. Podsakoff and Organ, 1986). Therefore, weconducted a Harman one-factor test as a preliminary analysis. Although more of a

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0.65

0.29

–12.Percentageof

energyforjob2

20.10

20.09

0.20

0.25

0.08

0.08

0.15

0.11

0.46

0.54

0.51

–

Subj

ecti

veca

reer

succ

ess

13.Careersatisfaction

120.02

0.08

0.15

0.16

0.11

0.07

20.04

20.01

0.06

0.02

0.16

0.27

–14.Careersatisfaction

20.16

0.13

0.28

0.28

20.01

20.05

20.02

20.02

20.03

0.17

20.08

0.25

0.44

–15.Perceived

career

success1

20.05

0.03

0.21

0.16

0.26

0.14

0.11

0.16

0.30

0.21

0.36

0.38

0.60

0.37

–16.Perceived

career

success2

0.01

20.02

0.23

0.32

0.11

0.04

0.16

20.02

0.13

0.28

0.10

0.52

0.47

0.61

0.52

–

Obj

ecti

veca

reer

succ

ess

17.Income1(EURO)

20.00

0.05

0.07

0.09

0.13

0.12

0.15

0.24

0.46

0.37

0.25

0.25

0.08

0.07

0.25

0.14

–18.Income2(EURO)

20.00

0.06

0.16

0.21

0.12

0.03

0.10

0.15

0.33

0.49

0.16

0.31

0.13

0.17

0.22

0.25

0.84

–19.Amountof

managerial/

leadership

tasks1

0.08

0.13

20.01

0.02

0.16

0.06

20.03

20.06

0.12

0.22

0.07

0.12

0.19

0.02

0.24

0.10

0.29

0.40

–20.Amountof

managerial/

leadership

tasks2

0.05

0.11

0.14

0.13

0.25

0.14

0.05

20.04

0.12

0.25

0.11

0.31

0.23

0.24

0.31

0.33

0.24

0.32

0.68

–

Notes:Listw

ise

n¼

130.Allcorrelations$0.18

aresignificantat

the0.05

level;allcorrelations$0.23

aresignificantat

the0.01

level(two-tailed)

Table I.Correlation matrix

Responsibilities,career fieldsand gender

303

rough diagnostic tool than a remedy, its results at least suggest that single-source biasposes no problem for this study: there was no “general factor” uniting supposedlyunrelated variables, and the principal components extraction resulted in sevencomponents with eigenvalues.1. Beyond that, the perceptional nature of the data hasto be taken into account when interpreting the findings.

ResultsDescriptive resultsTable II presents means and standard deviations for all variables entered into the PLSmodel for both survey rounds (labeled 1 and 2), for the whole sample and separated bygender. The sample numbers reported represent the minimum count of valid cases andare smaller than the original sample size owing to missing values.

Measurement modelPertinent literature (e.g. Goetz and Liehr-Gobbers, 2004; Hulland, 1999) suggests athree-step procedure for evaluating the measurement model:

(1) individual item reliabilities (i.e. their loadings/correlations with the latentvariable);

(2) composite reliability of the measures; and

(3) discriminant validity.

Concerning item loadings, it is recommended that all items have loadings .0.7, andthat items with loadings ,0.4 be dropped from the analysis (Hulland, 1999; Carminesand Zeller, 1979). In the present study, item loadings range from 0.95 to 0.64 for thecomplete model, with about one third of the variables having loadings slightly below0.7. For the models separated by gender these values deteriorate slightly. There is stilla minimum loading value of 0.57. The model has 50 percent and 85 percent of theloadings above the 0.7 threshold for the female and male models, respectively. Thebootstrapping procedure resulted in all loadings for all models being significant at the0.001 level.

Composite reliability can be assessed via Cronbach’s a and the internal consistencymeasure proposed by Fornell and Larcker (1981), with a recommended minimum valueof 0.7 for both (Nunnally, 1978). For the present model, both values are almost identicaland universally .0.7, ranging from 0.77 (objective career success) to 0.91 (familyresponsibility) for the total model, with virtually no difference for the gender-specificmodels and a minimum value of 0.73 (job alternatives in the female sample).

Discriminant validity is examined via the average variance shared between a latentvariable and its indicators (average variance extracted, AVE). This value should belarger than 0.5 (Fornell and Larcker, 1981, p. 46) and its square root should beconsiderably larger than the correlations of the latent variable with the other latentvariables (Hulland, 1999, p. 200). For the present study, merely the AVE of workcentrality (0.49) and objective career success (0.46) fall slightly short of the 0.5threshold (with the gender-specific models even performing marginally better here). Bycontrast, the square root of the AVE clearly exceeds the correlations with the otherconstructs for all latent variables and all three models.

Table III shows the statistical characteristics of the measurement models. Despitethe satisfactory results, there are some caveats. First, the number of indicators per

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304

Mean(SD)

Variable

Total

(n$

204)

Wom

en(n

$91)

Men

(n$

110)

t-test

Fam

ilyre

spon

sibi

lity

Score

11.57

(1.37)

1.54

(1.28)

1.60

(1.46)

Score

21.64

(1.34)

1.80

(1.27)

1.52

(1.40)

Job

alter

nati

ves

Perceived

jobalternatives

17.02

(2.54)

6.91

(2.47)

7.16

(2.61)

Perceived

jobalternatives

27.50

(2.58)

7.33

(2.62)

7.66

(2.53)

Change

abi

lity

Instabilityof

workcontent1

5.67

(2.78)

5.75

(2.80)

5.59

(2.76)

Instabilityof

workcontent2

5.48

(2.84)

5.44

(2.97)

5.50

(2.74)

Instabilityof

professional

relations1

4.60

(2.78)

4.69

(2.84)

4.51

(2.75)

Instabilityof

professional

relations2

4.42

(2.60)

4.08

(2.53)

4.66

(2.56)

Wor

kce

ntr

alit

yWeekly

workhours

146.0(9.2)

44.8(9.7)

47.1(8.6)

*

Weekly

workhours

247.0(11.2)

43.3(11.7)

50.1(9.9)

***

Percentageof

energyforjob1

65.9(16.1)

65.6(18.1)

66.2(14.0)

Percentageof

energyforjob2

65.0(18.3)

61.8(21.5)

67.7(14.6)

**

Subj

ecti

veca

reer

succ

ess

Careersatisfaction

17.81

(2.38)

8.00

(2.41)

7.63

(2.34)

Careersatisfaction

28.06

(2.41)

8.15

(2.28)

7.96

(2.56)

Perceived

career

success1

8.43

(1.69)

8.35

(1.81)

8.51

(1.58)

Perceived

career

success2

8.63

(1.74)

8.53

(1.91)

8.72

(1.60)

Obj

ecti

veca

reer

succ

ess

Income1(e)

39,987

(16,503)

33,935

(15,110)

45,456

(15,895)

***

Income2(e)

46,141

(22,460)

38,594

(17,842)

52,161

(24,270)

***

Amountof

managerial/leadership

tasks1

33.4(25.3)

30.8(24.7)

35.7(25.8)

Amountof

managerial/leadership

tasks2

34.9(27.3)

29.1(25.4)

39.2(27.6)

***

Notes:* p

,0:1;

** p

,0:05;*** p

,0:01

(two-tailed)

Table II.Means and standard

deviations of allobserved variables

Responsibilities,career fieldsand gender

305

Squareroot

(AVE)LVcorrelations

Latentvariable(LV)

Indicator

variable

CRloadings(total/w

omen/m

en)

1.2.

3.4.

5.6.

1.Fam

ilyresponsibility

0.91/

0.90/

0.89

0.9

13/

0.9

07/

0.8

98

Score

10.872/

0.873/

0.881

Score

20.953/

0.941/

0.914

2.Jobalternatives

0.90/

0.82/

0.95

0.037/

0.048/

0.003

0.9

07/

0.8

33/

0.9

51

Perceived

jobalternatives

10.887/

0.753/

0.980

Perceived

jobalternatives

20.926/

0.905/

0.921

3.Changeability

0.85/

0.80/

0.88

20.072/

20.212/

20.007

0.054/

0.154/

20.001

0.7

69/

0.7

13/

0.8

09

Instabilityof

workcontent1

0.731/

0.674/

0.763

Instabilityof

workcontent2

0.708/

0.596/

0.821

(con

tinued)

Table III.Summary of themeasurement models

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306

Squareroot

(AVE)LVcorrelations

Latentvariable(LV)

Indicator

variable

CRloadings(total/w

omen/m

en)

1.2.

3.4.

5.6.

Instabilityof

professional

relations1

0.821/

0.844/

0.724

Instabilityof

professional

relations2

0.811/

0.715/

0.915

4.Workcentrality

0.79/

0.80/

0.81

20.154/

20.349/

20.026

0.212/

0.213/

0.234

0.268/

0.367/

0.227

0.7

00/

0.7

11/

0.7

18

Weekly

workhours

10.801/

0.848/

0.760

Weekly

workhours

20.684/

0.739/

0.593

Percentageof

energyforjob1

0.635/

0.569/

0.793

Percentageof

energyforjob2

0.666/

0.659/

0.711

5.Subjectivecareer

success

0.82/

0.79/

0.84

0.037/

20.047/

0.095

0.315/

0.227/

0.403

0.118/

0.196/

0.077

0.352/

0.390/

0.353

0.7

33/

0.6

98/

0.7

54

Careersatisfaction

10.704/

0.656/

0.750

(con

tinued)

Table III.

Responsibilities,career fieldsand gender

307

Squareroot

(AVE)LVcorrelations

Latentvariable(LV)

Indicator

variable

CRloadings(total/w

omen/m

en)

1.2.

3.4.

5.6.

Careersatisfaction

20.693/

0.605/

0.718

Perceived

career

success1

0.651/

0.589/

0.729

Perceived

career

success2

0.866/

0.898/

0.816

6.Objectivecareer

success

0.77/

0.79/

0.77

0.081/

20.219/

0.241

0.155/

0.364/

0.041

0.170/

0.343/

0.069

0.442/

0.536/

0.410

0.326/

0.267/

0.436

0.6

80/

0.6

99/

0.6

81

Income1(e)

0.736/

0.733/

0.766

Income2(e)

0.653/

0.824/

0.566

Amountof

managerial/leadership

tasks1

0.664/

0.606/

0.665

Amountof

managerial/leadership

tasks2

0.665/

0.610/

0.712

Notes:CR,compositereliability;AVE,averagevariance

extracted

Table III.

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308

construct is rather low, which may lead to slightly biased estimates (underestimationof the structural paths linking the latent variables, and overestimation of the loadings;e.g. Chin et al., 1996), despite the adequate sample size. Second, job alternatives is asingle-item measure. This is an additional caveat, even though there are claims that forspecific and homogeneous constructs the use of single-item measures is acceptable(Loo, 2002; Robins et al., 2001; Gardner et al., 1998).

Structural modelFigure 2 shows the results for the structural model, for the whole sample and forwomen and men separately. For all path coefficients except Family responsibility!Job alternatives and Changeability!Work centrality, the differences between womenand men are statistically significant at the 0.01 level (two-tailed).

In line with the proposed relationships, for the total sample the structural modelshows that work centrality is positively influenced by both career field variables, i.e.changeability and job alternatives, and negatively influenced by family responsibilitiesand the interaction term, i.e. changeability moderating the influence of familyresponsibility. In turn, work centrality as predicted positively influences both objectiveand subjective career success. Objective career success has a positive relationship withsubjective career success, again in line with the proposed model. All relationships forthe total sample are statistically significant at the 0.05 or 0.01 level, respectively.Deviating from the model is only the lack of relationship between family responsibilityand job alternatives, suggesting that these are actually unrelated constructs.

Figure 2.Structural model: results

of analyses

Responsibilities,career fieldsand gender

309

When looking at gender differences, all statistically significant relationships for theoverall sample show significant differences between women and men, the onlyexception being the path between changeability and work centrality. Otherwise,negative effects of family responsibility on work centrality and positive effects of thelatter on both forms of career success are stronger for women. For job alternatives, thepositive effect on work centrality is stronger for men. Beyond that, three interestingresults emerge, all of them modifying the results of the overall sample and thepropositions from the model.

First, for men no statistically significant relationship exists between familyresponsibility and work centrality. For the overall and the female sample the expectednegative relationship exists. However, this is not the case for men.

Second, while for the overall and male sample, career field effects the resultsconform to our predictions, this is not the case for the women. For the former, theinteraction term with changeability moderating the influence of family responsibilityshows a negative effect. An increase in changeability by one standard deviation wouldincrease the negative effect of family responsibility on work centrality, e.g. for the totalsample from 20.13 to 20.3. For the women in our sample, by contrast, increasedchangeability has a positive effect on work centrality, i.e. it alleviates the hamperingeffect of family responsibility. For the men, where at the outset and contrary to ourpredictions, family responsibility has virtually no effect on work centrality, an increasein changeability creates the negative effect initially only experienced by the femalepart. Regarding the predictive value of the chosen variables for work centrality, careercontext and family variables plus the moderator term explain a higher proportion ofvariance for women than for men.

Third, there is a nonsignificant path from objective to subjective career success inthe female sample. In contrast, for the overall sample as well as for men there is acomparatively strong positive relationship, indicating that subjective career successdepends on objective success. This indicates that women do not depend on objectivesuccess in their evaluation of subjective career success, while men do.

Table IV shows the structural model’s statistical characteristics. As with themeasurement model, the structural model has some limitations. The R 2 values ofthe endogenous variables are rather modest in most instances, but the purpose ofthis study was not to identify the most important predictors, but rather toinvestigate the relationships between the latent variables and compare them withregard to gender. In a related vein, despite the commonly used term “causal model”,the survey design of our analyses (cross-sectional field study), together with therather exploratory nature of the PLS method, do not warrant inferences aboutcausality stricto sensu.

DiscussionWhile the results support most of the relations proposed by our model, they revealsome unexpected findings, too.

As for the impact of family responsibilities on work centrality, the total coefficientshows the expected negative impact, which is strong for females but not significant formales. Obviously more duties and efforts for family affairs reduce working hours andenergy left for the job. However, this does not apply to male young businessprofessionals. Family structures affect managerial advancement of women and men in

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310

Pathcoefficient(t-value):total/wom

en/m

enPredicted

Jobalternatives

Workcentrality

Objectivecareer

success

Subjectivecareer

success

Predictor

(R2¼

0.001/

0.002/

0.000)

(R2¼

0.158/

0.281/

0.164)

(R2¼

0.195/

0.287/

0.168)

(R2¼

0.160/

0.157/

0.226)

Fam

ilyresponsibility

0.037(0.65)/

0.048(0.54)/

0.003(0.04)

20.133(1.77)/

20.236(2.08)/

20.041(0.58)

Changeability

0.257(3.35)/

0.290(3.45)/

0.239(2.29)

Fam

ilyresponsibility£changeability

20.166(2.02)/

0.202(1.79)/

20.243

(2.05)

Jobalternatives

0.175(2.13)/

0.157(1.83)/

0.273(2.68)

Workcentrality

0.442(6.43)/

0.536(5.52)/

0.409(5.21)

0.259(2.53)/

0.347(1.88)/

0.209(1.96)

Objectivecareer

success

0.212(2.45)/

0.081(0.64)/

0.350(3.43)

Table IV.Summary of the

structural models

Responsibilities,career fieldsand gender

311

different ways. Whereas fathers’ careers benefit from their family role, mothers’ careeradvancement suffers from additional family responsibilities (e.g. Tharenou, 1999).Various reasons explain this disparity: traditional gender stereotypes and significantimparities in work compensation, career-orientation and work-addiction (Snir andHarpaz, 2006; Harpaz and Snir, 2003) lead women to assume the bigger share of familyduties. Whereas successful male managers are often expected to be paterfamilias, idealtype female business professionals do not have family duties. Schoon et al. (2007) showthat for women the effects of early childbearing bring more adverse outcomesregarding employment. These are possible causes for the small proportion in oursample having one child or more. Accordingly, married women work fewer hours perweek than unmarried women, while married men work more hours per week thanunmarried men (Snir and Harpaz, 2006) – often due to single breadwinnerconstellations.

Contrary to the model, our results do not show any influence of familyresponsibilities on job alternatives. We assumed that a higher level of familyresponsibilities will reduce job alternatives for in most cases spatial mobility as wellas temporal and income flexibility suffers from tight family bindings. Arguably, thecharacteristics of our sample are the major reason for the lack of support. Familyand partnership obligations of young business professionals – if they exist at all –are quite recent. Since individuals’ assessments of mobility, flexibility andopportunities on labor markets are subject to time-consuming adaptive processes,time lags need to be integrated into our model: it takes some years of familyexperiences to realize that degrees of freedom and job alternatives diminish due toexisting family responsibilities. On a side note, the impact of age on job alternativesmight be even stronger than that of family status, and evidently both influences willinteract although we did not control for age in our sample since there is littlevariance in this respect.

Job alternatives positively affect work centrality. For males this effect appearssignificantly stronger than for females. Thus, our reasoning already presented can befurther elaborated. Within the career fields of business professionals, at the very least,the assumption that tense labor markets and few job alternatives bring about longerworking hours is not supported. Again, the specifics of our sample provide someexplanations: young business professionals are hardly intimidated by unemploymentand status loss because of their high education and academic titles which work asstable career capital independent from concrete performance. On the other hand, theirprofessional identity is still under construction, a process accompanied by permanentsearch for external justification. The amount of job alternatives serves as justification,thus reinforcing work efforts. Gender differences show that women’s work centrality,which is generally lower not only in our sample (Mannheim, 1993; Mannheim andDubin, 1986), is less supported by a favorable position on the labor market (thoughnegative effects of unfulfilled job-expectations specifically strike women; Rindfusset al., 1999). Though our model assumes a link from job alternatives to work centrality,causalities between these two constructs are somehow ambiguous. On the one hand ahigher work centrality goes along with a higher level of commitment and attraction tothe organization (Carlson and Kacmar, 2000), but on the other hand this might also leadto career vigilance and perception of a wider range of alternatives. If work is moreimportant than family or leisure, actors will generally broaden their evoked set of job

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alternatives. Organizations which do not focus on this kind of transition risk losingtheir employees.

Changeability positively relates to work centrality and does so equally for men andwomen – there is no significant gender difference. The turbulence and dynamics ofwork content and professional relationships are career context factors stronglyaffecting employee attitudes and behavior, more specifically, their focus of attention(Gardner et al., 1989). From a different perspective this instrumentality is the backboneof HRM concepts (e.g. job rotation, job enrichment) and motivation theories (Fox andFeldman, 1988).

As for the moderating effect of changeability on family responsibilities’ impact onwork centrality, its strength, direction and gender-disparity is somehowcounter-intuitive and surprising:

. The negative coefficient for the total sample shows that an increase ofchangeability makes the impact of family responsibilities on work centralityeven more negative.

. The even stronger negative male coefficient indicates that for male businessprofessionals who do not experience a negative impact of family responsibilitiesper se and under rather stable conditions, this negative effect will occur ifchangeability increases.

. For women, it is the other way round: the moderating effect of changeability ispositive. For them, conditions of higher changeability alleviate the negativeeffect of family responsibilities on work centrality.

This is an interesting finding rarely analyzed hitherto: in more changeable situationsfamily responsibilities obviously get more important for men, detracting energy fromthe work sphere; for women, changeability weakens the negative impact of familyresponsibility on work centrality. Thus one could argue that increasing dynamics ofcareer fields contributes to gender matching as far as family responsibilities’ impact onwork centrality is concerned. Various explanations might apply, depending on thefocus on actors or structures.

From an actor’s perspective, women seem to be better prepared for dealing withwork changeability. Recent findings show that especially parental role commitmenthas direct positive effects on outcomes. Graves et al. (2007, p. 53) point out that theparental role may provide an even greater opportunity to develop skills that aretransferable to managerial role. According to the enhancement theory of roleaccumulation, an increase of role expectations also provides sources of identity,self-esteem, rewards and resources available to cope with the multiple demands(Thoits, 1987). Women with multiple life roles (e.g. mother, wife, employee) are lessdepressed, have higher self-esteem and are more satisfied with private life and jobcompared to women and men who were not married, unemployed or childless (Baruchand Barnett, 1987; Crosby, 1991). Maybe post-organizational contexts thus offer moreopportunities for women to find jobs with high temporal, social and task-flexibility asanchors for professional identification. From a structural perspective, growingturbulence in work environments detracts even women’s attention and energy from thefamily sphere. Under conditions of rapid change women cannot afford to mainlyconcentrate on family issues anymore without being in danger to loose touch withchanging job and work requirements.

Responsibilities,career fieldsand gender

313

Work centrality is positively linked with both subjective and objective careersuccess, as assumed in the model. Two aspects are interesting and somehowunexpected. First, the overall effect of work-centrality on objective is stronger than onsubjective career success. Second, the effect is stronger for women than for men. Forobjective career success, prior research has revealed positive effects of time andenergy devoted to work on income and hierarchical advancement (Mannheim et al.,1997; Rottenberry and Moberg, 2007). Compared with female, male work centrality ishigher rewarded, i.e. better transformed into income and power, which once againpoints towards gender injustice in career fields for business graduates (Strunk et al.,2005).

For subjective career success the positive impact of work centrality is based ondissonance theory (Festinger, 1959). Investments of time and energy into workcontribute positively to career satisfaction and subjective impressions of beingsuccessful. The theory of self-justification (Aronson, 1992a, b) further helps tointerpret gender differences, as the impact of work centrality on subjective careersuccess is significantly stronger for women. As the female business professionalsof our sample are discriminated in terms of objective success, they will strongerrely on internal justification of their investments into careers, i.e. on beingsatisfied.

This theory also offers explanations for our last finding: objective career successpositively contributes to subjective career success, i.e. satisfaction and subjectiveevaluation – but not for women. The assumed and obvious impact of income andhierarchical power on career satisfaction is true only for male business professionals.Obviously women get their career satisfaction from other sources then objectivesuccess – and one of them is work centrality, but keeping in mind that in our samplewe are taking about younger women we should be aware of the fact that especiallymidlife women strongly desire to continue and also be perceived as valuable to theirorganization also in the term of objective career success indicators (Gordon andWhelan, 1998).

ConclusionsOverall, we find clear support for effects of family responsibilities on career success.Via work centrality, there is a negative relationship between family responsibilitiesand objective and subjective career success. This result is in line with previousresearch and supports current insight by demonstrating this link for an importantsample, young business professionals. Two further main results enlarge previousfindings.

There is substantive support for the effect of contextual factors (here, career fields)for the relationship between family situations and career success. This points towardsthe importance of a multi-level perspective when analyzing work-family issues.Without taking contextual factors into account, analyses can fall short by missingimportant direct and indirect effects of context factors. Concepts such as career fieldsor career capitals help to bridge the different levels by providing conceptual tools forcontextual effects. For example, career capital as the symbolic capital “valid” in careerfields help to explain why the “same” portfolio of capital can have different effectsunder different contextual conditions. If the rules of the game temporarily orpermanently change, e.g. by a different pace of change, available capitals can used in

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different ways leading to more or less work centrality and, in turn, influencing careersuccess. These kinds of insights on career bring along interesting perspectives forcareer guidance, policy and counseling.

Finally, the results provide strong support for different effects of familyresponsibilities and career context on male and female careers. In prior research,three explanations for these differences have been offered and supported empirically(e.g. Kirchmeyer, 2006).

(1) The choice explanation claims that early career decisions affect later success.Family roles constrain especially women’s careers opportunities by imposinggeographical, temporal, or task related restrictions.

(2) The performance explanation assumes that family roles and responsibilitiesdifferently affect the abilities of men and women to perform at work.

(3) According to the signaling explanation, the career consequences of family stemneither from performance failures nor from choice restrictions, but from biasesof others. The granting of promotions and financial rewards is not solely basedon actual achievements, but also on signals of ability, future contributions, andinvolvement.

For our sample, the choice explanation seems to be least likely as there is norelationship between family responsibilities and job alternatives. But we have to beaware that this is a sample which is primarily in early career stage, whereas mid- andlate career women make different choices and have other models of success (Gordonand Whelan, 1998, p. 11). the performance explanation is supported by our data, sincefamily responsibilities affect the work centrality of men and women differently due tochangeability as part of the career context. Likewise, findings about the genderedrelation between work centrality and the dimensions of career success stronglyindicate the impact of signaling.

The results of this paper also have a number of practical consequences. First, giventhe substantial efforts that some companies make in order to retain valued employees,the results underscore the important relationship between external factors such asfamily responsibilities and work related factors such as work centrality and careersuccess. Hence, in order to use the existing work force most effectively, the work-familyinterface has to be focused in employee retention measures, too. Second, the resultspoint towards the importance of tailored HR policies. For example, for men and womenthe effects of family responsibilities and the importance of this area clearly differ.Thus, HR measures not only have to take into account a gender perspective, but shouldalso try to take into account different private settings of employees and the respectiverequirements for managing the work-private-interface. Third, the results also haveconsequences for the political sphere. They demonstrate the importance of the externalenvironment – family as well as economy related – for individual career success in theobjective and subjective sense. Political regulations governing the degree ofcompatibility between work and private life have a crucial impact for career relatedoutcomes, too.

On the whole, beyond the analysis of US-American academics (Kirchmeyer, 2006),the analysis shows gender specific family-influences on career outcomes for a furthercareer field in the European context. The debate on the relevance of familyresponsibilities emerged from a focus on women, particularly women with dependent

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children (Fleetwood, 2007), but our results show that the practices clearly affect menand researchers as well as practitioners need to be far more aware of the coherences inthis field. Additionally, it reveals that the gender-specific impact of familyresponsibilities is significantly moderated by the dynamics of career fields. Theresults and interpretation emphasize the importance of qualitative in-depth studies tofurther clarify issues raised in this paper, for example the question whether womenperceive the moderating effect of changeability positively – for example as anopportunity to enhance multiple role identities – or negatively – for example asstructural pressure to invest more energy into work with the implicit threat of beinghampered in their career.

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Corresponding authorWolfgang Mayrhofer can be contacted at: wolfgang.mayrhofer@wu-wien.ac.at

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