Career Plateau and Work Attitudes: An Empirical Study of Managers

Abstract

This study examines the effect of objective and subjective career plateau on the attitudes and behavior at work of a population of 2183 managers from three sectors of the Canada economy. Our study corroborates others that have found that "plateaued" and "non-plateaued" individuals respond differently to their work environment. Our results indicate that career plateau is associated with a number of consequences, once we have controlled for the effects of a number of personal characteristics such as age, sex, education, seniority and hierarchical level. The study also shows that the explanatory power of the subjective career plateau is significantly greater than that of objective career plateau. The explained variance in reactions is increased by at most 1% with the introduction of objective plateau for career satisfaction, while introducing subjective plateau into the model has the effect of increasing its explanatory power by 12%.