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Career commitment and career success: moderating role of emotion perception

June M.L. Poon
Faculty of Business Management, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi, Malaysia
Keywords Job commitment, Career satisfaction, Intelligence, Perception Abstract This study examined the moderating effect of emotion perception a basic component of emotional intelligence on the relationship between career commitment and career success. White-collar employees from a diverse set of occupations and organizations in Malaysia were surveyed. Moderated multiple regression results showed that career commitment predicted objective career success (i.e. salary level) only for employees with average to high emotion perception but not for those with low emotion perception. Emotion perception, however, did not moderate the effects of career commitment on subjective career success (i.e. career satisfaction). Implications of the ndings and suggestions for future research are discussed.

374
Received August 2003 Revised April 2004 Accepted April 2004

Career Development International Vol. 9 No. 4, 2004 pp. 374-390 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1362-0436 DOI 10.1108/13620430410544337

Why are some people more successful in their careers than others? Given that most people who work have a career, this is an interesting and important question for organizational practitioners and researchers. An examination of the literature on career success revealed several individual difference factors that inuence career success including demographic variables (e.g. Gattiker and Larwood, 1988), dispositional traits (e.g. Seibert et al., 1999), motivation (e.g. OReilly and Chatman, 1994), and political inuence behaviors (e.g. Judge and Bretz, 1994). Human capital attributes such as cognitive ability (e.g. Dreher and Bretz, 1991), education (e.g. Childs and Klimoski, 1986), and job tenure (e.g. Judge et al., 1995) have also been demonstrated to predict career success. Recently, organizational scholars have suggested that another important human capital predictor of career success is emotional intelligence. In many of the writings on emotional intelligence, the components and competencies underlying this construct have been touted as important determinants of life and career success (cf. Cooper and Sawaf, 1997; Goleman, 1995). Most of these claims, however, are anecdotal and derivative (Dulewicz and Higgs, 1999, 2000), and to date there is little systematic empirical evidence to support these claims (Jordan et al., 2002a; Mayer, 1999). Thus, the validity of emotional intelligence as a determinant of career success rests mostly on conceptual work. In addition, with the exception of a few works (e.g. Ciarrochi et al., 2002; Jordan et al., 2002b) most of the theorizing and research on the effects of emotional intelligence have framed it as a variable that has direct effects on its outcomes. The effects of emotional intelligence, however, need not be direct. Emotional intelligence, for example, could boost the effects of other determinants of career success by way of moderation.
An earlier version of this article was presented at the 44th Western Academy of Management Conference in Palm Springs, USA on 12 April 2003.

Therefore, I hope to expand research on career success by examining whether emotion perception, a core component of emotional intelligence, predicts career success indirectly through moderation. In this study, I used career commitment as the independent variable. People who are committed to their careers should experience more career success than those who are less committed, although empirical research testing such a link is still limited. In sum, the primary purpose of this study was to examine the moderating effect of emotion perception on the relationship between career commitment and career success. This is perhaps the rst study to test such an idea. Conceptualization and prediction of career success Arthur et al. (1989, p. 8) have dened a career as an evolving sequence of a persons work experiences over time. The accumulation of achievements (real or perceived) arising from these work experiences is career success (Judge et al., 1999). Career researchers (e.g. Gattiker and Larwood, 1988; Judge et al., 1995; Nabi, 1999) have generally conceptualized career success to comprise both extrinsic and intrinsic outcomes and, accordingly, measured this construct using objective indicators as well as subjective reactions. Extrinsic outcomes of career success (labeled objective career success) comprise visible outcomes such as pay and promotion and are, therefore, relatively more observable than intrinsic outcomes of career success (labeled subjective career success), which depend on a persons appraisal of his or her own success (Judge et al., 1995). Whereas objective career success takes a third-person perspective, subjective career success refers to a persons own internal perspective of success. It is ones feelings of accomplishment and satisfaction with ones career (Judge et al., 1995). A persons own perspective of success is important to consider because people who have achieved success in the objective sense may not actually feel successful or proud of their achievements (Korman et al., 1981). Although related, objective and subjective career success are conceptually distinct with potentially different causes (Judge and Bretz, 1994; Nabi, 1999). For example, one study found educational achievement to be a predictor of objective career success but not subjective career success and work centrality to be a predictor of subjective career success but not objective career success (e.g. Nabi, 1999). Therefore, both objective and subjective career success should be considered in models of career success. Career commitment Career commitment refers to identication with and involvement in ones occupation (Mueller et al., 1992, p. 212) and is characterized by the development of and commitment to career goals (Colarelli and Bishop, 1990). In brief, it refers to ones motivation to work in a chosen vocation (Hall, 1971). People who are committed to their careers should experience more subjective career success (e.g. have more positive feelings for the career) than those who are less committed. Past studies, for example, have found that employees who commit to a job or career tend to develop attitudes consistent with that commitment (e.g. Carson et al., 1999; Kiesler, 1971). In a study of the inuence of career commitment and organizational commitment on work-related outcomes, Carson et al. (1999) found medical librarians high on career commitment to have higher career satisfaction than those low on career commitment. In addition, Lee et al. (2000) in their meta-analytic

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study of occupational commitment found this variable to correlate positively with career satisfaction. People who are committed to their careers should also experience more objective career success than those who are less committed. Committed individuals should be willing to make signicant investments in their careers (e.g. put forth more effort, acquire new knowledge and skills). One study, for example, found career commitment to predict learning motivation and learning transfer (Cheng and Ho, 2001). In addition, people who are committed to their career will likely set high career goals for themselves and put forth effort as well as persist in pursuing these goals even in the face of obstacles and setbacks (Colarelli and Bishop, 1990). Greater effort and perseverance generally leads to higher performance (Bandura, 1993; Locke and Latham, 1990a). High performance, in turn, should result in extrinsic rewards such as higher salaries or promotions (e.g. Greenhaus and Parasuraman, 1993) as well as intrinsic rewards such as self-satisfaction, which stem from positive appraisals that people make of themselves when their performance is successful relative to their internal standards (Bandura, 1986; Locke and Latham, 1990b). In sum, career commitment should lead to more successful careers in the form of other-administered rewards (e.g. salary attainment) or self-administered rewards (e.g. career satisfaction). Therefore, I propose: H1a. Career commitment will be positively related to salary level. H1b. Career commitment will be positively related to career satisfaction.

Emotional intelligence Emotional intelligence, an individual difference that can be developed, is related to, yet distinct from, other intelligences (Ashkanasy and Daus, 2002). It refers to the ability to perceive emotion, integrate it in thought, understand it, and manage it successfully (Ashkanasy et al., 2002; Mayer, 1999). People who are emotionally intelligent are able to recognize and use their own emotional states as well as that of others to regulate behavior and deal with the environment (Huy, 1999). Various models of emotional intelligence have been forwarded for conceptualizing and operationalizing the construct. Those found in the popular literature tend to incorporate personality, motivational, and relationship skill variables (e.g. self-condence, integrity, initiative, resilience, inuence tactics, leadership skills) in their conceptualization. For example, Golemans (1998a, b) emotional competence framework comprises the dimensions of self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. Cooper and Sawafs (1997) four-cornerstone model relates a variety of competencies, values, beliefs, and tendencies to the broad dimensions of emotional literacy, tness, depth, and alchemy. Finally, the competency framework of Dulewicz and Higgs (2000) consists of 16 competencies, many of which correlate highly with existing personality measures. Because emotional intelligence as dened in these models cannot be easily distinguished from that of existing personality or motivational constructs, does not meet the traditional criteria for an intelligence, and goes beyond what is meant by the term emotion, these models are not pure models of emotional intelligence (Hedlund and Sternberg, 2000; Mayer, 1999). In order for emotional intelligence to add value to the study of abilities, it must be differentiated from

personality variables and general intelligence (Davies et al., 1998), as is the case with Mayer and Saloveys (1997) more restrictive ability model of emotional intelligence. According to Mayer and Saloveys (1997) model, four main hierarchically-arranged abilities underlie the emotional intelligence construct: emotion perception, emotional facilitation of thinking, understanding of emotions, and regulation or management of emotions. In this study, I decided to focus on emotion perception because it is common to all the major models of emotional intelligence (see Rozell et al., 2002, for a review) and has been demonstrated to relate with important organizational outcomes including supervisory status, leadership skills, and job performance (Elfenbein and Ambady, 2002a). Also, Davies et al. (1998) in a series of studies using a comprehensive set of instruments that have been proposed to measure emotional intelligence found only the factor of emotion perception to emerge as distinct from personality or general intelligence. Moderating role of emotion perception Emotion perception, the rst and most basic component of emotional intelligence in Mayer and Saloveys (1997) model, refers to the ability to identify emotions (in oneself and in others), express emotions accurately, and discriminate between accurate and inaccurate expressions of emotions. This concept is similar to the self-awareness and social awareness dimensions of other emotional intelligence models (e.g. Goleman et al., 2002) and Gardners (1983) intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligence. According to Mayer and Salovey (1997), only when the ability to perceive, appraise, and express emotions is mastered can one advance to the emotional facilitation of thinking, understanding of emotions, and management of emotions. Although emotion perception may directly inuence work-related outcomes, it may be better conceived as a variable that facilitates the effects of other variables on career success. According to theories of motivation and performance (e.g. Locke and Latham, 1990b), what drives behavior and subsequent performance are factors such as goals, self-efcacy, rewards, and commitment not the ability to perceive and express emotions. At the empirical level, recent meta-analytic work has shown emotion perception to have only a weak relationship with performance (Van Rooy and Viswesvaran, in press). Although such ability may not be a strong predictor of performance and career success in and of itself, it can help boost the effects of the main drivers of performance and success. In this study, I propose that emotion perception will play a moderating role in the career commitment-career success linkage. Although there is no direct empirical evidence for this assertion, there are theoretical reasons for it. As argued earlier, career commitment motivates people to set career goals and invest in their career by putting forth effort to achieve such goals. These career strategies can be enhanced by emotion perception in various ways. For example, emotional self-awareness facilitates the use of emotional input to form judgments, make choices, and decide among options and the ability to express emotions enables one to effectively communicate with others to realize ones goals (George, 2000). Therefore, people who are able to perceive and understand their own feelings should be able to better assess their job skills and interests, set appropriate career objectives, develop realistic career plans, and obtain the developmental experiences needed to take advantage of career opportunities. Engaging in these activities will enhance career

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progression (London and Stumpf, 1982). In addition, emotion perception should enable people to keep their career decisions in harmony with their needs and values and, consequently, experience career satisfaction. Also, because most jobs require interactions with others (e.g. customers, co-workers, supervisors), whether or not ones career commitment can be translated into career success will depend on ones level of interpersonal perceptiveness and skills. People who are able to perceive and understand emotions in others should be socially adept and be able to relate well with others (Schutte et al., 2001). In addition, the ability to perceive emotion has been found to be related to empathy (e.g. Mayer et al., 1999; Mayer et al., 1990). These qualities should help one secure positive reactions and evaluations from others (e.g. favorable job performance ratings from supervisors), foster and maintain high quality relationships with others, and accumulate social capital. A supportive relationship with superiors is an important contributor to ones career advancement (Igbaria and Wormley, 1992), and social capital the networks of connections and alliances one forms with others can be leveraged to maximize career success (Ferris et al., 2000). There is evidence that career progress and other organizational rewards are determined on the basis of inuence or interpersonal behaviors (see Ferris and Judge, 1991, for a review). To conclude, the effects of career commitment on career success can be facilitated by emotion perception. Career commitment should have a strong inuence on career success among people high in emotion perception but may add relatively little to career success among people low in emotion perception. Therefore, I propose: H2a. Emotion perception will moderate the relationship between career commitment and salary level such that the relationship will be stronger at higher than at lower levels of emotion perception. H2b. Emotion perception will moderate the relationship between career commitment and career satisfaction such that the relationship will be stronger at higher than at lower levels of emotion perception. Method Sample and procedure Part-time graduate business students (with full-time employment) from three large public universities in Malaysia (located in the same state and not more than 60 km from one another) were surveyed. Although this study used a non-western sample, I expect career commitment and emotion perception to inuence career success as predicted by western models of career success. I know of no research addressing the specic issues of this study in a cross-cultural context; however, there is some related research evidence that supports my assertion. For example, a recent comparative study of Australian and Malaysian managers found no signicant differences between the two groups with regard to career identity and career planning commitment (Noordin et al., 2002), and a study of MBA graduates in Hong Kong found career commitment to predict learning motivation and transfer as predicted in western models (Cheng and Ho, 2001). With regard to emotion perception, a recent meta-analytic study found emotions to be recognized universally at better than chance levels (Elfenbein and Ambady, 2002b), and a study of emotional intelligence in seven countries (Bangladesh, China, Greece, Hong Kong, Portugal, South Africa, and USA) yielded results that were

generally consistent across the countries (Rahim et al., 2002). Therefore, the use of this Asian sample should yield results not too different from those obtained using western samples. An accompanying cover letter stated that the study was solely for academic purposes and was aimed at examining peoples attitudes toward their job, career, and life in general. Participants completed the questionnaires anonymously and returned them to the researchers or course instructors who distributed the questionnaires. Because the survey was administered in-class (taking between 15-20 minutes of class time), almost all students enrolled in the classes involved in the study participated, giving a response rate of 93 percent. Non-respondents comprised mainly those who were absent during survey administration. Of the 201 participants who completed the survey questionnaire, 19 did not provide salary data which were crucial for the analyses and were dropped from the sample. Two respondents, found in data screening analyses to be univariate outliers using a criterion of z . ^ 3.00 (cf. Tabachnick and Fidell, 1989), were also dropped from the sample. Therefore, the nal analytic sample comprised 180 employees (114 men, 66 women) from more than 100 organizations. This sample of respondents represented a wide range of functional backgrounds and occupations including administrative, managerial, professional, and technical jobs. The mean age of this diversied sample was 33.28 years (SD 7.34), the mean organizational tenure was 7.08 years (SD 6.87), and the mean years of total work experience was 9.79 (SD 7.69). About 58 percent of the respondents were married, and 95 percent held an undergraduate or a more advanced degree. Measures The major measures for the study were career commitment, emotion perception, and career success. Unless stated otherwise, participants responded to all questionnaire items for these measures using a rating scale ranging from 0 totally disagree) to 10 (totally agree). I averaged ratings on items for each measure to form an overall score for the measure. A higher score indicated a higher standing on the measure. Emotion perception. As noted by some scholars (cf. Van Rooy and Viswesvaran, in press; Wong and Law, 2002), the measurement of emotional intelligence is still in its infancy, and little is known about the psychometric properties of existing measures of emotional intelligence. Therefore, I developed an emotion perception measure specically for this study. I did not use the multifacet emotional intelligence scale (Mayer et al., 1999) because it was not practical to use this performance test which used 186 items to assess emotion perception for the purpose of this study. Drawing on reviews of the emotional intelligence literature and available measures (e.g. Goleman, 1995; Mayer and Salovey, 1997; Salovey et al., 1995; Schutte et al., 1998; Wong and Law, 2002), I generated 12 items to assess emotion perception. To check for item suitability, I subjected these items to an exploratory factor analysis using pilot data from 97 employed, part-time undergraduate business students. Three factors emerged with eigenvalues greater than 1.0 that cumulatively explained 59 percent of the common variance (see Appendix). Only the rst two factors, however, were retained for further analyses with the present data because the third factor, which comprised only two items, posed a reliability problem. The rst factor included ve items that referred to perceptions about ones own emotions (e.g. I am usually aware of

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how I feel), and the second factor included ve items that referred to perceptions about the emotions of others (e.g. I can tell how people feel by looking at their body language). To assess the adequacy of the derived emotion perception measure for use with the present data, I subjected the retained ten items to a conrmatory factor analysis using EQS 5.1 (Bentler, 1995), comparing a correlated two-factor (rst-order factor) structure to a second-order factor structure (in which emotion perception was specied as a higher order factor to account for the correlation between the two lower order factors). The result of a chi-square difference test was not signicant; therefore, on the basis of parsimony, I decided to adopt the second-order factor model (chi-square 35.49, df 33; CFI 0.98; GFI 0.96; AGFI 0.94; RMSR 0.83), which positions emotion perception as a higher order construct that is made up of two sub-dimensions (self perception and other perception). Accordingly, I formed an overall measure of emotion perception by averaging the ratings of the ten items (Cronbach alpha 0.78). Career commitment. I measured career commitment using Colarelli and Bishops (1990) 17-item career commitment scale (e.g. I am willing to put in a great deal of effort beyond that normally expected in order to be successful in this career). These researchers reported an internal consistency of 0.94 for this measure and provided evidence of good convergent validity and modest discriminant validity. In the present study, the internal consistency was 0.88. Career success. I assessed career success using salary level as the objective indicator and career satisfaction as the subjective indicator. For the salary variable, participants indicated their current monthly salary. Because the salary data was positively skewed (z 10.56, p , 0.001) and kurtotic (z 11.81, p , 0.001), I transformed the salary variable using a natural logarithmic transformation. Such transformation of salary data is consistent with the practice of other researchers (e.g. Judge et al., 1995; Seibert et al., 2001). For the career satisfaction measure, participants evaluated their career satisfaction using a ve-item scale taken from Greenhaus et al. (1990). A sample item is I am satised with the success I have achieved in my career. Greenhaus et al. reported an internal consistency of 0.88 for this scale. In the present study, the internal consistency was 0.83. Control variables. Past studies have found variables such as gender, education, and work experience to affect career success (e.g. Aryee et al., 1996; Judge and Bretz, 1994; Judge et al., 1995; Nabi, 1999). Therefore, these variables were included as control variables in the analyses. Gender was analyzed as a dichotomous variable (dummy coding 0 male, 1 female). Work experience was measured with a single item that asked participants to state the number of years of their total work experience. Finally, because almost all participants held at least an undergraduate degree and were enrolled in a graduate program, educational attainment was controlled for. Data analysis I checked the data for violations of the assumptions of normality, linearity, heteroscedasticity, and multicollinearity; no signicant problems were evident after two outlier cases were deleted and two variables (salary and work experience) log transformed.

I used hierarchical multiple regression to test the study hypotheses, entering the control variables rst, the main effect variables (i.e. career commitment and emotion perception) second, and the multiplicative interaction term last. Before forming the interaction term, I centered the predictor and moderator variables (i.e. transformed the raw scores into deviation scores with means equal to zero) to reduce the potential problem of multicollinearity with the interaction term due to scaling (Aiken and West, 1991; Jaccard et al., 1990). The variance ination factor scores associated with each regression coefcient ranging from 1.03 to 1.13 indicated that multicollinearity was not a problem after conducting the centering procedure. The signicance of the interaction was determined by examining the signicance of the increment in criterion variance (beyond the variance accounted for by the main effects) that is explained by the interaction term. To have a clearer picture of the moderation effect, I plotted the interaction graphically following procedures used in recent research (e.g. Ferris et al., 2001). I used values one standard deviation below and above the mean for the predictor variable and values one standard deviation below, at, and above the mean for the moderator variable for the plot. Finally, at each of the three values of the moderator, I computed the coefcient for the slope of the dependent variable on the predictor variable following the procedures of Jaccard et al. (1990).

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Results Table I presents the means, standard deviations, zero-order correlations, and reliability coefcients of the study variables. All the measures had alpha reliabilities that exceeded 0.70 (Nunnally, 1978). On the average, respondents reported experiencing a level of career commitment of 6.26, a level of emotion perception of 6.78, and a level of career satisfaction of 6.32 (measured on an 11-point scale). Career commitment, emotion perception, and the control variables were signicantly correlated with the career success variables. H1a predicted that career commitment would be positively related to salary level, and H1b predicted that career commitment would be positively related to career satisfaction. Multiple regression analyses testing a main effects model yielded a signicant and positive regression coefcient for career commitment on salary (b 0.21, p , 0.01) and on career satisfaction (b 0.68, p , 0.001), suggesting support for the two hypotheses. As expected, emotion perception was not signicantly related to career success after career commitment and the control variables were taken into account.
Variable 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
b

M 0.37 1.91 6.26 6.78 7.96 6.32

SD 0.48 0.95 1.49 1.06 0.48 1.85

1 2 0.17* 0.01 0.02 2 0.18* 2 0.05

2 0.07 0.04 0.50*** 0.18*

Gendera Work experienceb Career commitment Emotion perception Salary levelb Career satisfaction

(0.88) 0.32*** 0.27*** 0.69***

(0.78) 0.18* 0.20**

0.25**

(0.83)

Notes: Alpha reliabilities are shown in parentheses on the diagonal; acoded 0 male, 1 female; natural logarithm; *p , 0.05, **p , 0.01, ***p , 0.001

Table I. Descriptive statistics, scale reliabilities, and correlations of study variables (n 180)

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H2a stated that emotion perception would moderate the relationship between career commitment and salary, and H2b stated that emotion perception would moderate the relationship between career commitment and career satisfaction. The results of model 3 shown in Table II indicated a signicant interaction between emotion perception and career commitment for salary that explained variance in the model beyond that due to the main effects (DR 2 0.02, p , 0.05). The interaction term, however, was not signicant for career satisfaction (see Table III). Thus, H2a received support, but H2b did not. A clearer picture of the form of the interaction for H2a can be obtained by examining the plotted interaction effect in Figure 1. In general, the regression slope was steeper for employees with high emotion perception than for those with low
Model 1 Variable B Model 2 Model 3

b
2 0.10 0.48***

B 2 0.11 0.23*** 0.07** 0.04

b
2 0.11 0.46*** 0.21** 0.10

B 2 0.11 00.23*** 0.06** 0.04

b
2 0.11 0.45*** 0.19** 0.09

Step 1: control variables Gendera 2 0.10 Work experienceb 0.24*** Step 2: main effects Career commitment Emotion perception Step 3: interaction effect Career commitment emotion perception R2 R 2 change

Table II. Hierarchical regression results for the effects of career commitment and emotion perception on salary level (n 180)

0.04* 0.26*** 0.32*** 0.06***

0.16* 0.34*** 0.02*

Notes: aCoded 0 male, 1 female; bnatural logarithm; p , 0.10, *p , 0.05, **p , 0.01, ***p , 0.001

Model 1 Variable Step 1: control variables Gendera Work experienceb Step 2: main effects Career commitment Emotion perception Table III. Hierarchical regression results for the effects of career commitment and emotion perception on career satisfaction (n 180) Step 3: interaction effect Career commitment emotion perception R2 R 2 change B 2 0.08 0.35*

Model 2

Model 3

b
2 0.02 0.18*

B 2 0.15 0.25* 0.85** 2 0.03

b
2 0.04 0.13* 0.68** 2 0.02

B 2 0.15 0.25* 0.85** 2 0.03

b
2 0.04 0.13* 0.68** 2 0.02

0.01 0.03* 0.49** 0.46**

0.01 0.49** 0.00

Notes: aCoded 0 male, 1 female; bnatural logarithm; *p , .05, **p , 0.001

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Figure 1. Graphical representation of the moderating effect of emotion perception on the relationship between career commitment and salary level

emotion perception. Post-hoc analyses of the slopes conrmed this observation. At high emotion perception, the slope estimate was 0.11 (t 4.05, p , 0.01); at mean emotion perception, the slope estimate was 0.06 (t =2.88, p , 0.05); and at low emotion perception, the slope estimate was 0.01 (t =0.49, ns). These results indicate that there is a relationship between career commitment and salary level only at average to high levels of emotion perception but not at low levels of emotion perception. Together, the above results showed that career commitment was positively related to both salary level and career satisfaction. For salary level, however, this relationship was stronger at higher than at lower levels of emotion perception. Therefore, emotion perception moderated the effects of career commitment on salary level.

Discussion Discussion of ndings The study showed that career commitment predicted objective career success in the form of salary level and subjective career success in the form of career satisfaction. More importantly, the study ndings point to the moderating role that emotion perception played in facilitating the effects of career commitment on objective career success. The results indicted that the relationship between career commitment and salary level was contingent on the level of emotion perception. Specically, career commitment was positively related to salary level only among individuals with at least moderate levels of emotion perception; among those low on this ability, career commitment mattered little in determining salary level. This nding suggests that, perhaps, one should not expect people to achieve objective career success simply

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because they are committed to their career. Other moderating factors need to be considered also. Contrary to expectations, emotion perception did not moderate the relationship between career commitment and career satisfaction. It appears that people who are committed to their career will experience satisfaction regardless of their levels of emotion perception. This nding suggests that the mechanisms that operate to inuence objective and subjective career success are not necessarily the same, thus supporting the arguments of other researchers of the importance of assessing both objective and subjective components of career success (cf. Nabi, 1999). A managerial implication of the ndings of this study is that if organizations want their employees to achieve objective career success, attention must be given to developing them emotionally in addition to increasing their career commitment. Therefore, practitioners need to know how peoples ability to perceive, appraise, and express emotions can be developed (e.g. through introspection, training, and so forth). In addition, practitioners need to gain a better understanding of what determines career commitment. Researchers can contribute to this effort by identifying both individual differences (e.g. self-efcacy, learning goal orientation) and organizational factors (e.g. mentoring programs, career counseling services) that affect career commitment and incorporating these variables into models of career commitment and success. Given that career commitment extends beyond the boundaries of organizations, environmental factors (e.g. societal inuences) also should not be overlooked. As organizations continue to downsize and restructure in the face of increased global competition and technological advances, resulting in changes in the employment relationship or psychological contract (Sullivan, 1999), career commitment is likely to take on added relevance for practitioners. Under the altered psychological employment contract, employees are expected to increasingly adopt protean careers in which the focus is on personal development and employability rather than on job security and progression in a single organization (Hall, 1996). Therefore, organizations can expect employees to shift their focus from commitment to the organization to commitment to their career. In view of this, organizations must ensure that employees see the achievement of organizational goals as instrumental for the development of their personal career. Career commitment is also likely to take on added importance as a management concept and research construct relative to other workplace commitment concepts such as organizational commitment (see Baruch, 1998, for a discussion of the declining importance of organizational commitment as a concept in management in the new business environment). Therefore, management scholars need to pay more attention to this construct in related theoretical and empirical work. Another research implication of the ndings of this study is that instead of solely viewing emotion perception (or other components of emotional intelligence) as a variable that directly affects career success, researchers should also consider emotion perception as a variable that indirectly affects career success by moderating the relationship between antecedents of career success and career success. Future research will need to reconsider how emotion perception and other components of emotional intelligence should be positioned theoretically and studied empirically.

Study limitations and future research This study has a number of limitations. First, although the emotion perception measure used has acceptable reliability and predictive validity, it needs to be tested in other settings. As is true with the development of any new measure, there is a need for ongoing construct validation of this measure. Second, the theoretical perspective adopted in this study implies that career commitment and emotion perception precedes career success. It is possible, however, that the relationship is reciprocal or the reverse of what has been postulated. Given the cross-sectional nature of the study, this alternative line of reasoning cannot be dismissed categorically, and this study should be replicated with longitudinal data. Third, common method variance could have inated relationships among variables. However, given the complexity of the moderated relationships in this study, it seems unlikely that common method bias could account completely for the pattern of results. In the case of the ndings for objective career success, the factual nature of the salary variable further ameliorates concerns about common method variance effects. Furthermore, the results of various studies suggest that common method effects are less prevalent than previously thought. For example, Spector (1987) found little evidence for method variance using data from multitrait-multimethod analyses, studies of social desirability and acquiescence, and relation of self-report and absenteeism. Crampton and Wagner (1994) concluded from their meta-analysis of more than 500 studies that percept-percept ination may be more the exception than the rule and that several areas of research including career advancement appear to be relatively free of effect-size ination. More recently, Chan (2001), using a latent variable approach, showed that the impact of method effects (e.g. affective disposition and social desirability) on estimation of substantive relations among self-reports of work attitudes (including organizational commitment and job satisfaction) was trivial. In this study, I did not examine variables that might mediate the relationship between career commitment and career success. In future research, it would be interesting to examine motivational and performance mechanisms for explaining career commitment effects on career success. In the future, researchers may also want to expand the career success variables examined for a more complete understanding of the joint effects of career commitment and emotion perception. In addition, because I focused only on emotion perception as a moderator in this study, other variables that have the potential to enhance the positive impact of career commitment on career success (such as political savvy as well as other components of emotional intelligence) should be explored. The role of other emotional intelligence components in moderating the effects of other predictors of career success also warrants further investigation. An integration of career variables and emotional intelligence in future works holds promise for developing a more comprehensive model of career success. Finally, future research that investigates why emotion perception has a moderating inuence in the prediction of career success would provide a useful extension of the present study. Could it be that people with high emotion perception are more able than those with low emotion perception to seek job environments that t with their needs, values, and dispositions? A t between the person and environment should lead to higher satisfaction and job performance (cf. Kristof, 1996). Or, perhaps people who are emotionally perceptive take a more active role in managing their careers by engaging in career strategies that facilitate career success (e.g. consulting with mentors,

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networking, self-promotion of ability). Empirical insights on the intervening mechanisms that help trigger the moderating inuence of emotion perception in the prediction of career success will help scholars to rene future models of career success. Despite its limitations, this study adds to the limited empirical literature relating career commitment and objective career success. In addition, it contributes to the literature on careers by demonstrating that emotion perception moderates the relationship between career commitment and objective career success. It represents a step toward combining a motivational construct and an emotional ability construct and showing that they work interactively to predict objective career success. I know of no previous attempt to examine the moderating role of emotion perception within the context of the careers literature and hope more scholars will pursue research along this line of inquiry.
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Appendix

Item

I 0.78 0.76 0.74 0.69 0.53

Factor II

III

h2 0.61 0.59 0.63 0.54 0.35 0.80 0.79 0.58 0.40 0.34 0.78 0.70

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Table AI. Results of factor analysis of the emotion perception measure

1. Often put things aside for a while to get perspective 2. Can see the funny side of things 3. Usually aware of how I feel 4. Know when I am getting upset 5. Let people know when uncomfortable feelings get in the way 6. Aware of how people feel even if they do not say it 7. Can usually tell how people feel about me 8. Can sense mood of a group when I walk into a room 9. Can read between the lines when someone is talking 10. Can tell how people feel by looking at their body language 11. Can talk myself out of bad moods 12. Let others know what I want and need Eigenvalue Percent of variance explained

0.33 0.34 2.90 24.15

0.88 0.88 0.75 0.56 0.44 2.83 23.59 2 0.80 0.74 1.39 11.59

Notes: n 97; values shown in italics indicate items retained for each factor. Only factor loadings exceeding ^ 0.10 are presented