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JMP
23,3 The influence of family
responsibilities, career fields and
gender on career success
292
An empirical study
Received April 2007
Revised December 2007
Wolfgang Mayrhofer
Accepted December 2007 Interdisciplinary Unit of Management and Organisational Behaviour,
Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, Vienna, Austria
Michael Meyer
Unit of Nonprofit Management, Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, Vienna, Austria
Michael Schiffinger
Interdisciplinary Unit of Management and Organisational Behaviour,
Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, Vienna, Austria, and
Angelika Schmidt
Institute of Change Management and Management Development,
Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, Vienna, Austria
Abstract
Purpose – The paper seeks to analyze empirically the consequences of family responsibilities for
career success and the influence of career context variables and gender on this relationship.
Design/methodology/approach – The sample consists of 305 business school graduates (52
percent male) from a major Central European university who finished their studies around 2000 and
who were in their early career stages (i.e. third and fourth career years).
Findings – The paper reports a negative relationship between family responsibilities and objective
and subjective career success via work centrality. There is also substantive support for the effect of
contextual factors on the relationship between family situations and career success, emphasizing the
importance of a multi-level perspective. Finally, evidence of gender effects exists.
Research limitations/implications – The empirical generalizability of the results is limited by the
structure of the sample. Qualitative in-depth studies are needed to further understand the relationships
found.
Practical implications – The results underscore the importance of the work-family-interface for
employee retention measures. Tailored HR policies are crucial.
Originality/value – Theoretically, the paper develops a multi-level causal model of specific aspects
of 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 or
in the early stages of their family life.
Keywords Sociology of work, Family, Careers, Gender
Paper type Research paper
Journal of Managerial Psychology
Vol. 23 No. 3, 2008
pp. 292-323 Introduction
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0268-3946
Work-family relations are central to individuals, organizations and policy makers. For
DOI 10.1108/02683940810861392 individuals, they relate to issues such as life satisfaction, work-life balance, or career
success (e.g. Greenhaus et al., 2003; Kirchmeyer, 2006; Ford et al., 2007). For Responsibilities,
organizations, work-family relations touch on individual and organizational career fields
performance, scope of flexibility in terms of work capacity or organizational
programs allowing employees to better combine private and occupational demands and gender
(e.g. Hall, 1990; Osterman, 1995; Kossek and Lambert, 2005). For policy makers, they
lead 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 or 293
legislative 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 negative
spillover in terms of work-family conflict than the other way round, i.e. that work and
family can positively influence one another (see, for example, Eby et al., 2005). In
addition, some aspects of this relationship are clearly less researched. Among them is,
first, the context of work careers. Work-family relations are frequently analyzed
without relating them to the specific career context relevant to individuals. While the
macro-context of legal regulations, population demography or economic development
is regularly taken into account (e.g. Poelmans and Sahibzada, 2004), the importance of
the specific career context, i.e. factors such as characteristics of the profession or the
kind of careers individuals are pursuing, is less acknowledged (for notable exceptions
see, for example, Greenhaus et al., 2001; Perry-Smith and Blum, 2000). Second, the
importance of gender for work-family relations is not yet fully developed. While a
gender perspective is prominent in work-family and career research and many results
point towards gender based differences in family relations and work careers, calls for
more fine-grained analyses of different aspects of gender effects abound (e.g. Higgens
et al., 2000; Stoner et al., 1990).
The current paper responds to these deficits by taking up a classical issue of
work-family studies – effects of the family situation on careers, analyzing here the
effects of family responsibilities on career success – and developing it further through
two differentiations cutting across various levels of analysis: first, by analyzing the
effects in different types of career contexts, and second by differentiating along the
gender dimension. Specifically, this paper addresses three major questions:
(1) What effects do individuals’ family responsibilities have on their objective and
subjective career success?
(2) How do core characteristics of individuals’ career context influence these
effects?
(3) Are these effects different for men and women?
In answering these questions, the current paper proposes a causal model with crucial
linkages between family responsibility (family level), career context (meso-level) and
career success (individual level). Using a sample of young business professionals, the
paper investigates empirically the proposed relationships using partial least squares
analyses. The paper contributes to the theoretical as well as empirical advancement of
the field. Regarding the former, the paper further develops specific aspects of
work-family relations, presents a model based on current literature and includes
variables from different conceptual levels ranging from meso (career context) to more
micro (family, individual). Empirically, the study focuses on a specific group: young
JMP business professionals prior to having a family or in the early stages of their family life.
23,3 Thus, insight into this specific group, which is important for many businesses, is
generated and possible generalizations are discussed.
Conceptual background
Research on the work-family interface, careers and the importance of work provides
294 essential insight into the link between family responsibilities and career outcomes. It
points towards the importance of work centrality as a key linking factor and
emphasizes gender as a differentiating variable.
Work-family interface
The 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 than
ever before (Edwards and Wajcman, 2005, p. 47). In the last 50 years partnership ideas
have 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 early
twenty-first century in industrialized countries, fertility is a choice variable and
cohabitation, separation and divorce are commonplace. Because of these changing and
separating views of roles, the supporting activities of (female) partners can no longer
be taken for granted. The forms of partnerships and families have differentiated
(Schmidt, 2001): rather traditional forms (living together in the same household with or
without marriage), couples living and working in various locations (so called
commuters or long-distance marriages), or couples living in the same area but who
have 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 or
more children. In addition, it varies whether the children are living with their biological
parents or not (patchwork families or stepfamilies). Parental demands are a function of
the 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 highest
for persons with infants and pre-school children, lower for those with school-age
children, and lowest for those with adult children not living at home (Osherson and
Dill, 1983).
Family involvement refers to the importance of the family to an individual and the
extent of psychological investment in the family. As in the case of job involvement,
family involvement is likely to generate internal pressures to invest increased effort
and energy in the family domain to fulfill family role demands (Parasuraman and
Simmers, 2001, p. 555). Beside the number of children, the work life of the partners and
their career orientations (e.g. single breadwinner orientation versus dual earning
constellations or dual career couples) are important factors influencing the form of
family responsibility (e.g. Blossfeld and Drobnic, 2001; Lewis and Cooper, 1987).
Models of the family concern the allocation of roles and responsibilities, role
specialization and the division of labor among adult family members (Hakim, 2005,
p. 56).
Numerous studies have examined characteristics of the family domain as predictors
of work-family conflict. Most of the research at least implicitly assumes that
work-family conflict negatively affects the psychic and physical condition of
individuals and their enjoyment of work and life. As a consequence, disadvantages for
companies may result because of reduced productivity and increased turnover Responsibilities,
(Greenhaus et al., 2001; Cooper and Williams, 1994; Ganster and Schaubroeck, 1991). career fields
These studies have found that conflict is higher among those who:
.
have children at home (Behson, 2002; Carlson, 1999);
and gender
.
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); 295
.
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 and
energy that individuals are able and willing to devote to work. Consistent with
gender-based normative expectations, women still generally bear primary
responsibility for home maintenance and childcare irrespective of their employment
status. Although employed married women spend less time on housework and
childcare than non-employed women, they devote considerably more time to home and
family in fulfilling their family role responsibilities than men (Parasuraman and
Simmers, 2001; Pleck, 1985). Researchers have argued that in a workforce that is
increasingly composed of individuals in “post-traditional families”, work-family
conflict 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 even
higher for the self-employed (Jennings and McDougald, 2007; Parasuraman and
Simmers, 2001; Loscocco, 1997).
Characteristics of the work context are important predictors for work-family
conflict, too. In particular, work variability (Fox and Dwyer, 1999) and forms of
working hours such as working weekends (Schneider, 2005) are related to higher
conflict. 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). This
indicates that the work and career contexts of individuals (i.e. factors such as demands
and pressures from work, degree of turbulence, etc.) constitute important influencing
factors when analyzing the effects of family situations on career success.
Careers
Career success. Career success is an integral part of career research (for a recent
overview, see, for example, Gunz and Heslin, 2005). Despite the huge body of literature
on factors influencing career success, little scholarly attention has been devoted to
analyzing 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 is
defined as directly observable, measurable, and verifiable by an impartial third party
when looking at attainments such as pay, promotions, or occupational status. The
latter is only experienced directly by the person and defined by an individual’s
reactions to his or her unfolding career experiences (Hughes, 1937, 1951). It heavily
depends on individuals’ (re)construction of career success according to subjective and
JMP individualized patterns. Objective and subjective views on careers constitute a
23,3 “two-sidedness” inherent in the career concept. The subjective-objective career duality
expresses these two dimensions as unique, empirically distinct constructs (Arthur et al.,
2005) showing different patterns of correlations with commonly used predictor
variables (Ng et al., 2005). Arthur and Rousseau (1996) found that more than 75 per cent
of the career-related articles published in major interdisciplinary journals between
296 1980 and 1994 focused on objective perspectives. Over the last decade, however,
subjective criteria have increasingly been adopted (see, for example, the literature
review by Arthur et al., 2005).
Importance of career context. Work careers are embedded in the broader economic
and institutional environment. In career terms, contributions from labor economics as
well as sociology for a long time have specifically dealt with issues like labor market
segmentation, 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). The
career literature in the more narrow sense takes a more restricted and a greatly diverse
perspective. It includes contributions such as the specific characteristics of occupations
and their labor market consequences (Tolbert, 1996) or the analysis of specific aspects
such 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 emphasizing
the role of the context for individual careers. For Bourdieu, a social field is a patterned
set of practices. In this playground various actors with a field-relevant capital try to
advance their position by following individual strategies. Careers as the sequence of
positions influenced by work related individual efforts are not a field, but unfold within
a field. These career fields are the social context within which individual members of
the work force make their moves. Individuals try to maintain or improve their place in
the given and unfolding network of work related positions through their field-relevant
career capital and a patterned set of practices. The latter are constrained by their career
capital 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 the
closeness of relationships and the degree of mutual influence between the focal actor
and the other actor(s) in the field. Configuration focuses on changes in the
configuration of relationships between the focal actors and other relevant actors over a
longer period of time.
Importance of work
Work 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 and
developing oneself and a source of social recognition. Hinting at the importance of
work for individuals (Harpaz, 1986), work centrality is conceptualized and measured in
three 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 work
in general; Pryor and Davies, 1989).
Compared to job involvement (i.e. the extent of preoccupation and immersion in present Responsibilities,
jobs; Paullay et al., 1994) and organizational centrality (i.e. the extent to which an career fields
employee is integrated into the network of interpersonal relationships within the work
system; (O’Hara et al., 1994), work centrality is the broader concept (Diefendorff et al., and gender
2002).
Work centrality is related to a number of outcomes at the individual level. This
includes a positive relationship on career outcome variables such as organizational 297
commitment, career planning, and wages (Mannheim et al., 1997), the hours spent on
work (Snir and Harpaz, 2006), attitudes and job performance (Peterson and
Ruiz-Quintanilla, 2003), workaholism (Harpaz and Snir, 2003), job satisfaction and
participation in decision making (Kanungo, 1982), and job tenure (Dubin et al., 1975).
Gender plays an important role when analyzing the effects of work centrality. Research
indicates that gender moderates some of the effects, e.g. in the area of job involvement
and organizational citizenship behavior (Diefendorff et al., 2002), workaholism (Harpaz
and 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 success

Based on the research outlined briefly above, the following issues related to the three
research questions emerge. From the discussion about the importance of work, work
centrality evolves as crucial construct. Hence, this variable plays a central role in the
causal model as a “linking pin” between the contextual variables, i.e. the family and
work situation, and individual career outcome variables. The literature on the
work-family interface points towards family responsibility as a core variable when
looking at effects of the family situation on career success. It influences – among other
things – the amount of time and energy that individuals are able and willing to devote
to work, i.e. their work centrality. In turn, work centrality is an important factor for
both objective and subjective career success. Research on career success clearly points
towards these two distinctive dimensions of career success with objective careers
success influencing subjective success. Also stemming from the extant career literature
and belonging to the more confined work on career context (for an overview see
Mayrhofer et al., 2007) are the core characteristics of the respective career fields. In
particular, changeability and job alternatives directly influence work centrality. In
addition, changeability has a moderating effect on the link between family
responsibility and work centrality. Fourth, gender as a major “cross-sectional”
phenomenon has an effect on the link between family responsibilities and work
centrality. 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. family
responsibility, work centrality, career fields and career success) to each other (see
Figure 1). It is explained in more detail below.
Family responsibility and its effects

A overview of the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working
Conditions (2003, p. 48) showed that on average across 16 European countries, men
would prefer to work a 36.5-hour week and women a 30-hour week. Family
responsibilities are the main reason mentioned for this interest in reducing actual
working hours. Therefore, family responsibilities and the wish or need for other
JMP
23,3
298
Figure 1.
Family responsibility,
career fields and career
success: a causal model
working time arrangements reduce the perceived job alternatives. In addition, a

growing expectation of mobility exists (Schneider, 2005). Jobs in high qualification
segments are especially linked with a growing amount of business travel (see, for
example, Harris et al., 2005). Hence, family responsibilities reduce the number of jobs
available.
The assumption that workers can choose the amount of overall working hours
freely is only partly correct. Böheim and Taylor (2004) state that rigidities in the labor
market still remain especially for jobs with flexible work hours.
Family responsibilities also influence the importance of work. Family status has
been 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 for
other domains. This constraint yields a negative direct relationship between family
and work resources available for the other domain (Edwards and Rothbard, 2000).
Gender plays an important role for the work related effects of family
responsibilities. Gendered roles affect the conditions and consequences of the
work-family conflict (Carlson and Kacmar, 2000). Women’s job satisfaction depends on
family member’s emotional state (King et al., 1995), and the determinants of job
satisfaction 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 of
partnership and household – all these factors influence the perception of job centrality
and have negative effects on the experienced work centrality. In particular, female
managers who experienced high levels of family role salience and long work hours
(also) experienced the highest of work-family conflict (Stoner et al., 1990).
Career fields and work centrality Responsibilities,
As mentioned above, we focus on two characteristics of career fields: career fields
(1) job alternatives constitute a core indicator for tight/loose coupling: the fewer job and gender
alternatives 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 being
a dead-end position; and
(2) changeability of both work content and professional relationships represent the 299
dimension of configuration.
Prior research is barely sufficient to profoundly assess the impact of both dimensions
of career fields on work centrality. However, there are some results on related issues.
Increasing dynamics generated new forms of vocational identities, especially “new
career negotiators” in the telecommunications industry (Dif, 2004), which indicates a
higher importance of job-related issues. Within a sample of technical contractors, a
majority worked longer hours and rarely scheduled their time in a flexible way despite
conditions of new temporal flexibility and dynamics (Evans et al., 2004). Several
scholars argue that increasing flexibility and changeability of work conditions do not
indispose the importance of psychological contracts (Marsden, 2004; McGovern et al.,
1996). New contracts might imply higher work centrality. As changeability is
concerned, we assume that actors within a more turbulent work context tend towards a
higher work centrality, as these situations command more attention than stable ones
and attract more time and energy, detracting it from the leisure and family sphere. In
general, we suppose that the overall relationship between changeability and work
centrality has an inverse U-shape. However, our sample does not reach the point where
turbulence at work detracts attention. Thus, we assume a positive relation.
The same direction of relationship is assumed for job alternatives and work
centrality: the more alternatives actors have and/or perceive to have in labor markets
and career fields, the more important work will get for them and the more hours they
will work. Having alternatives and opportunities is a clear indicator of an individual’s
value and position on labor markets, thus strengthening work-specific self-efficacy and
self confidence. Contrarily, a loss of career perspectives and job alternatives results in
locked-in effects (van Ours, 2004), thus reducing not only job search activities, but also
work centrality and job-involvement.
This direction of impact is not supported by economic research, which shows a
countercyclical characteristic of working hours and vacation time (e.g. Altonji and
Usui, 2007) and negative impacts of labor market rigidities on individually preferred
reduction of working hours (Böheim and Taylor, 2004). For our sample of young
business professionals, we nevertheless assume that the first effect is stronger than the
latter. At least in early career phases we assume a strong reinforcing cycle between the
perceptions of one’s professional attractiveness and an actor’s investment of time and
energy into work (success to the successful; Senge, 1990, Appendix 2).
Work centrality and career success

Work centrality is positively related to both dimensions of career success. For objective
career success, research suggests that the time and energy devoted to work has
positive 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
JMP example, Rottenberry and Moberg, 2007). For subjective career success, a positive link
23,3 to 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 energy
into work positively relates to subjective impressions of being successful. In order to
avoid cognitive dissonance, individuals putting a lot of emphasis on work are under
internal pressure to see their work involvement and outcomes more positively than
300 persons where work plays a lesser role.
Objective and subjective career success

Various possibilities of influencing directions between objective and subjective career
success have been formulated. Most frequently it is assumed that objective success has
a positive influence on subjective success (e.g. Korman et al., 1981) since individuals
interpret their subjective success on the basis of their objective accomplishments
(Judge et al., 1995). In their review, Arthur et al. (2005) also identify studies considering
a two-way interdependence between the two dimensions of career success. Individuals
constantly interpret and reinterpret the work experience and career success they have
had. They experience certain levels of objective success, create understandings about
what constitutes career success for them and individually act on those understandings.
Empirically unfolding as a moderate correlation between the two (Ng et al., 2005), their
relationship stays a complex one (Nicholson and DeWaal-Andrews, 2005, p. 142).
Sample, variables and methods

Data collection and sample
The data for this study were collected via questionnaire during the 2004 and 2005
follow-up surveys of a panel study started in 2000. The sample consists of 305 business
school graduates (52 percent male) from a major Central European university who
finished their studies around 2000. The data roughly cover the participants’ third and
fourth career year – still the career entry stage, but not the immediate beginning. The
mean sample age is 32.2 years (women: 31:7 ^ 2:8; men: 32:8 ^ 2:4). Concerning age
and gender distribution, the sample is representative for the graduates of the whole
university at the time, which supplies roughly half the national market for business
school graduates. As to marital status and number of children, 33 percent/30 percent
were single in the first and second survey round, respectively; 11 percent/7 percent
lived in separate households, 29 percent/29 percent lived in a shared household, and 27
percent/32 percent were married. Regarding the number of children, there was
virtually no difference between the survey rounds: 83 percent had no child, 11 percent
had one child, and the remaining 6 percent had two or more children. Although this low
percentage of parents seems quite normal for a sample of young business
professionals, it makes for an extremely skewed distribution. Still, this should not
distort the results, as the method employed (see below) is quite robust against skewed
data (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 and
second survey rounds, respectively). The inclusion of other forms of family
responsibilities such as elder care would have been beneficial. Unfortunately, no
systematic data was available in this respect.
Methods Responsibilities,
We analyzed our data with a partial least squares (PLS) procedure (e.g. Chin, 1998; career fields
Lohmoeller, 1989; Wold, 1975), which allows structural modeling with latent variables
but has less strict assumptions than “traditional” covariance-based structural equation and gender
modeling (LISREL approach) concerning sample size, level of measurement, and
multinormality (Fornell and Bookstein, 1982, p. 440). As in LISREL, the complete
model consists of two components: 301
(1) the measurement (or outer) model where the observed variables form the latent
variables; and
(2) the structural (or inner) model, which deals with the relationships between the
latent 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 (Ringle
et al., 2005); all other calculations, including standardizing the variables before
conducting the PLS analyses, were done with SPSS. Standardization was especially
relevant for including the interaction term (Chin et al., 1996, p. 26), with changeability
supposed to moderate the effect of family responsibility on work centrality.
The significance of the path coefficients was determined using a bootstrap
procedure (e.g. Chin, 1998) with 500 subsamples. Gender differences were tested for
statistical 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.:
PCwomen 2 PCmen
t ¼ qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ;
2
ðm21Þ 2 ðn21Þ2 2 1 1
ðmþn22Þ £ SE women þ ðmþn22Þ £ SEmen £ mþn
where m and n are the number of men and women in the sample, respectively, PC is the
path 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 formative
approach, 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 available
social support (see above). As sound formative measurement requests that all relevant
indicators be included (Bollen and Lennox, 1991, p. 307), we chose reflective
measurement models throughout.
Measures
The following variables from both survey rounds were entered into the model as
indicators of the latent variables. For family responsibility, the available data were the
number of children and marital status (single, with partner/separate households, with
partner/shared household, married). Based on the reasoning that being single without
children usually means less family responsibility than living in partnership and the
assumption that family responsibilities increase when one has to take care of children,
the following scheme was applied to quantify family responsibility: for participants
without children, being single scored 0, a partner living in a separate household scored
JMP 1, a shared household or being married scored 2. For participants with children, the
same marital statuses scored 4, 3, and 2, respectively, with the number of children
23,3 being added to the score. For example, this leads to the following scores: single, no
child: 0; married, no child: 2; married, one child: 3; married, two children: 4; single
parent, one child: 5.
Basically, the children’s age arguably plays an important role for the family
302 responsibility, too. However, in the latter of the two follow-up surveys one year ago, the
mean age of the children was 2.4 years (^ 2.1 years). As all children of our sample are
still in pre-adolescence infanthood, we did not include the children’s age in our
analyses. Furthermore, all children lived in the participants’ households, which is why
there was no need to differentiate between children living in the household and
children living elsewhere in the analyses.
In a related vein, family responsibility may include duties like elder care, obligations
towards “chosen” family members, or community responsibilities, which are not
included in our study owing to omission of these data in the survey. Although this is
admittedly a minor drawback for this topic, we assume that marital status and
childcare 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 adequate
job could be found should the need arise (11-point scale from “not at all” to “very
easily”). Work centrality was measured by focusing on behavior/output related as well
as attitudinal aspects. For the former, we used reported actual work hours per week; for
the latter, we used the proportion of “life energy” invested in the job (11-point scale
ranging from 0 percent to 100 percent). Subjective career success was measured by two
ratings:
(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 the
perceived amount of managerial/leadership-related tasks in the job (11-point scale
ranging from 0 percent to 100 percent).
Despite a sometimes fierce discussion about the use of objective and subjective
success measures in organizational research (for firm performance see, for example,
Wall et al., 2004) and the frequent use of perceptional measures in career research, it
certainly has its limits. Hence, some additional analyses were conducted in order to see
whether single-source biases can be detected. Table I shows the correlation matrix for
all variables. It indicates no irregularities pointing towards problems with the
variables. The fact that all these variables were collected via a self-report questionnaire
raises the issue of single-source bias (e.g. Podsakoff and Organ, 1986). Therefore, we
conducted a Harman one-factor test as a preliminary analysis. Although more of a
Variable 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Family responsibility
1. Score 1 –
2. Score 2 0.82 –
Job alternatives
3. Perceived job alternatives 1 2 0.04 0.03 –
4. Perceived job alternatives 2 0.03 0.08 0.65 –
Changeability
5. Instability of work content 1 2 0.05 2 0.02 0.01 0.05 –
6. Instability of work content 2 2 0.10 2 0.11 0.11 2 0.02 0.47 –
7. Instability of professional
relations 1 2 0.04 2 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.56 0.39 –
8. Instability of professional
relations 2 2 0.10 2 0.05 0.15 0.02 0.35 0.63 0.56 –
Work centrality
9. Weekly work hours 1 2 0.17 2 0.18 0.08 2 0.01 0.17 0.14 0.23 0.17 –
10. Weekly work hours 2 2 0.14 2 0.08 0.27 0.25 0.17 0.19 0.22 0.23 0.47 –
11. Percentage of energy for job 1 2 0.12 2 0.04 0.08 0.02 0.21 0.09 0.17 0.16 0.65 0.29 –
12. Percentage of energy for job 2 2 0.10 2 0.09 0.20 0.25 0.08 0.08 0.15 0.11 0.46 0.54 0.51 –
Subjective career success

13. Career satisfaction 1 2 0.02 0.08 0.15 0.16 0.11 0.07 2 0.04 2 0.01 0.06 0.02 0.16 0.27 –
14. Career satisfaction 2 0.16 0.13 0.28 0.28 2 0.01 20.05 2 0.02 2 0.02 20.03 0.17 2 0.08 0.25 0.44 –
15. Perceived career success 1 2 0.05 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 success 2 0.01 2 0.02 0.23 0.32 0.11 0.04 0.16 2 0.02 0.13 0.28 0.10 0.52 0.47 0.61 0.52 –
Objective career success

17. Income 1 (EURO) 2 0.00 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. Income 2 (EURO) 2 0.00 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. Amount of managerial/
leadership tasks 1 0.08 0.13 2 0.01 0.02 0.16 0.06 2 0.03 2 0.06 0.12 0.22 0.07 0.12 0.19 0.02 0.24 0.10 0.29 0.40 –
20. Amount of managerial/
leadership tasks 2 0.05 0.11 0.14 0.13 0.25 0.14 0.05 2 0.04 0.12 0.25 0.11 0.31 0.23 0.24 0.31 0.33 0.24 0.32 0.68 –
Notes: Listwise n ¼ 130. All correlations $ 0.18 are significant at the 0.05 level; all correlations $ 0.23 are significant at the 0.01 level (two-tailed)
Responsibilities,
and gender
Correlation matrix
career fields
303
Table I.
JMP rough diagnostic tool than a remedy, its results at least suggest that single-source bias
23,3 poses no problem for this study: there was no “general factor” uniting supposedly
unrelated variables, and the principal components extraction resulted in seven
components with eigenvalues . 1. Beyond that, the perceptional nature of the data has
to be taken into account when interpreting the findings.
304 Results
Descriptive results
Table II presents means and standard deviations for all variables entered into the PLS
model for both survey rounds (labeled 1 and 2), for the whole sample and separated by
gender. The sample numbers reported represent the minimum count of valid cases and
are smaller than the original sample size owing to missing values.
Measurement model
Pertinent literature (e.g. Goetz and Liehr-Gobbers, 2004; Hulland, 1999) suggests a
three-step procedure for evaluating the measurement model:
(1) individual item reliabilities (i.e. their loadings/correlations with the latent
variable);
(2) composite reliability of the measures; and
(3) discriminant validity.
Concerning item loadings, it is recommended that all items have loadings . 0.7, and
that items with loadings , 0.4 be dropped from the analysis (Hulland, 1999; Carmines
and Zeller, 1979). In the present study, item loadings range from 0.95 to 0.64 for the
complete model, with about one third of the variables having loadings slightly below
0.7. For the models separated by gender these values deteriorate slightly. There is still
a minimum loading value of 0.57. The model has 50 percent and 85 percent of the
loadings above the 0.7 threshold for the female and male models, respectively. The
bootstrapping procedure resulted in all loadings for all models being significant at the
0.001 level.
Composite reliability can be assessed via Cronbach’s a and the internal consistency
measure proposed by Fornell and Larcker (1981), with a recommended minimum value
of 0.7 for both (Nunnally, 1978). For the present model, both values are almost identical
and universally . 0.7, ranging from 0.77 (objective career success) to 0.91 (family
responsibility) for the total model, with virtually no difference for the gender-specific
models and a minimum value of 0.73 (job alternatives in the female sample).
Discriminant validity is examined via the average variance shared between a latent
variable and its indicators (average variance extracted, AVE). This value should be
larger than 0.5 (Fornell and Larcker, 1981, p. 46) and its square root should be
considerably larger than the correlations of the latent variable with the other latent
variables (Hulland, 1999, p. 200). For the present study, merely the AVE of work
centrality (0.49) and objective career success (0.46) fall slightly short of the 0.5
threshold (with the gender-specific models even performing marginally better here). By
contrast, the square root of the AVE clearly exceeds the correlations with the other
constructs for all latent variables and all three models.
Table III shows the statistical characteristics of the measurement models. Despite
the satisfactory results, there are some caveats. First, the number of indicators per
Mean (SD)
Variable Total (n $ 204) Women (n $ 91) Men (n $ 110) t-test
Family responsibility
Score 1 1.57 (1.37) 1.54 (1.28) 1.60 (1.46)
Score 2 1.64 (1.34) 1.80 (1.27) 1.52 (1.40)
Job alternatives
Perceived job alternatives 1 7.02 (2.54) 6.91 (2.47) 7.16 (2.61)
Perceived job alternatives 2 7.50 (2.58) 7.33 (2.62) 7.66 (2.53)
Changeability
Instability of work content 1 5.67 (2.78) 5.75 (2.80) 5.59 (2.76)
Instability of work content 2 5.48 (2.84) 5.44 (2.97) 5.50 (2.74)
Instability of professional relations 1 4.60 (2.78) 4.69 (2.84) 4.51 (2.75)
Instability of professional relations 2 4.42 (2.60) 4.08 (2.53) 4.66 (2.56)
Work centrality
Weekly work hours 1 46.0 (9.2) 44.8 (9.7) 47.1 (8.6) *
Weekly work hours 2 47.0 (11.2) 43.3 (11.7) 50.1 (9.9) ***
Percentage of energy for job 1 65.9 (16.1) 65.6 (18.1) 66.2 (14.0)
Percentage of energy for job 2 65.0 (18.3) 61.8 (21.5) 67.7 (14.6) **
Subjective career success

Career satisfaction 1 7.81 (2.38) 8.00 (2.41) 7.63 (2.34)
Career satisfaction 2 8.06 (2.41) 8.15 (2.28) 7.96 (2.56)
Perceived career success 1 8.43 (1.69) 8.35 (1.81) 8.51 (1.58)
Perceived career success 2 8.63 (1.74) 8.53 (1.91) 8.72 (1.60)
Objective career success

Income 1 (e) 39,987 (16,503) 33,935 (15,110) 45,456 (15,895) ***
Income 2 (e) 46,141 (22,460) 38,594 (17,842) 52,161 (24,270) ***
Amount of managerial/leadership tasks 1 33.4 (25.3) 30.8 (24.7) 35.7 (25.8)
Amount of managerial/leadership tasks 2 34.9 (27.3) 29.1 (25.4) 39.2 (27.6) ***
Notes: *p , 0:1; * *p , 0:05; * * *p , 0:01 (two-tailed)

Responsibilities,
and gender
Means and standard

career fields
observed variables
deviations of all
305
Table II.
23,3
JMP
306
Table III.
Summary of the
measurement models
Latent variable (LV) Square root (AVE) LV correlations
Indicator variable CR loadings (total/women/men) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
1. Family responsibility 0.91/ 0.913/

0.90/ 0.907/
0.89 0.898
Score 1 0.872/
0.873/
0.881
Score 2 0.953/
0.941/
0.914
2. Job alternatives 0.90/ 0.037/ 0.907/
0.82/ 0.048/ 0.833/
0.95 0.003 0.951
Perceived job alternatives 1 0.887/
0.753/
0.980
Perceived job alternatives 2 0.926/
0.905/
0.921
3. Changeability 0.85/ 20.072/ 0.054/ 0.769/
0.80/ 20.212/ 0.154/ 0.713/
0.88 20.007 20.001 0.809
Instability of work content 1 0.731/
0.674/
0.763
Instability of work content 2 0.708/
0.596/
0.821
(continued)
Instability of professional relations 1 0.821/

0.844/
0.724
Instability of professional relations 2 0.811/
0.715/
0.915
4. Work centrality 0.79/ 20.154/ 0.212/ 0.268/ 0.700/
0.80/ 20.349/ 0.213/ 0.367/ 0.711/
0.81 20.026 0.234 0.227 0.718
Weekly work hours 1 0.801/
0.848/
0.760
Weekly work hours 2 0.684/
0.739/
0.593
Percentage of energy for job 1 0.635/
0.569/
0.793
Percentage of energy for job 2 0.666/
0.659/
0.711
5. Subjective career success 0.82/ 0.037/ 0.315/ 0.118/ 0.352/ 0.733/
0.79/ 20.047/ 0.227/ 0.196/ 0.390/ 0.698/
0.84 0.095 0.403 0.077 0.353 0.754
Career satisfaction 1 0.704/
0.656/
0.750
(continued)
Responsibilities,
and gender
career fields
Table III.
307
23,3
JMP
308
Table III.
Career satisfaction 2 0.693/

0.605/
0.718
Perceived career success 1 0.651/
0.589/
0.729
Perceived career success 2 0.866/
0.898/
0.816
6. Objective career success 0.77/ 0.081/ 0.155/ 0.170/ 0.442/ 0.326/ 0.680/
0.79/ 20.219/ 0.364/ 0.343/ 0.536/ 0.267/ 0.699/
0.77 0.241 0.041 0.069 0.410 0.436 0.681
Income 1 (e) 0.736/
0.733/
0.766
Income 2 (e) 0.653/
0.824/
0.566
Amount of managerial/leadership tasks 1 0.664/
0.606/
0.665
Amount of managerial/leadership tasks 2 0.665/
0.610/
0.712
Notes: CR, composite reliability; AVE, average variance extracted
construct is rather low, which may lead to slightly biased estimates (underestimation Responsibilities,
of the structural paths linking the latent variables, and overestimation of the loadings; career fields
e.g. Chin et al., 1996), despite the adequate sample size. Second, job alternatives is a
single-item measure. This is an additional caveat, even though there are claims that for and gender
specific and homogeneous constructs the use of single-item measures is acceptable
(Loo, 2002; Robins et al., 2001; Gardner et al., 1998).
309
Structural model
Figure 2 shows the results for the structural model, for the whole sample and for
women and men separately. For all path coefficients except Family responsibility !
Job alternatives and Changeability ! Work centrality, the differences between women
and men are statistically significant at the 0.01 level (two-tailed).
In line with the proposed relationships, for the total sample the structural model
shows that work centrality is positively influenced by both career field variables, i.e.
changeability and job alternatives, and negatively influenced by family responsibilities
and the interaction term, i.e. changeability moderating the influence of family
responsibility. In turn, work centrality as predicted positively influences both objective
and subjective career success. Objective career success has a positive relationship with
subjective career success, again in line with the proposed model. All relationships for
the 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 responsibility
and job alternatives, suggesting that these are actually unrelated constructs.
Figure 2.
Structural model: results
of analyses
JMP When looking at gender differences, all statistically significant relationships for the
23,3 overall sample show significant differences between women and men, the only
exception being the path between changeability and work centrality. Otherwise,
negative effects of family responsibility on work centrality and positive effects of the
latter on both forms of career success are stronger for women. For job alternatives, the
positive effect on work centrality is stronger for men. Beyond that, three interesting
310 results emerge, all of them modifying the results of the overall sample and the
propositions from the model.
First, for men no statistically significant relationship exists between family
responsibility and work centrality. For the overall and the female sample the expected
negative relationship exists. However, this is not the case for men.
Second, while for the overall and male sample, career field effects the results
conform to our predictions, this is not the case for the women. For the former, the
interaction term with changeability moderating the influence of family responsibility
shows a negative effect. An increase in changeability by one standard deviation would
increase the negative effect of family responsibility on work centrality, e.g. for the total
sample from 2 0.13 to 2 0.3. For the women in our sample, by contrast, increased
changeability has a positive effect on work centrality, i.e. it alleviates the hampering
effect of family responsibility. For the men, where at the outset and contrary to our
predictions, family responsibility has virtually no effect on work centrality, an increase
in changeability creates the negative effect initially only experienced by the female
part. Regarding the predictive value of the chosen variables for work centrality, career
context and family variables plus the moderator term explain a higher proportion of
variance for women than for men.
Third, there is a nonsignificant path from objective to subjective career success in
the female sample. In contrast, for the overall sample as well as for men there is a
comparatively strong positive relationship, indicating that subjective career success
depends on objective success. This indicates that women do not depend on objective
success in their evaluation of subjective career success, while men do.
Table IV shows the structural model’s statistical characteristics. As with the
measurement model, the structural model has some limitations. The R 2 values of
the endogenous variables are rather modest in most instances, but the purpose of
this study was not to identify the most important predictors, but rather to
investigate the relationships between the latent variables and compare them with
regard 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 the
rather exploratory nature of the PLS method, do not warrant inferences about
causality stricto sensu.
Discussion
While the results support most of the relations proposed by our model, they reveal
some unexpected findings, too.
As for the impact of family responsibilities on work centrality, the total coefficient
shows the expected negative impact, which is strong for females but not significant for
males. Obviously more duties and efforts for family affairs reduce working hours and
energy left for the job. However, this does not apply to male young business
professionals. Family structures affect managerial advancement of women and men in
Path coefficient (t-value): total/women/men
Predicted Job alternatives Work centrality Objective career success Subjective career success
Predictor (R 2 ¼ 0.001/ (R 2 ¼ 0.158/ (R 2 ¼ 0.195/ (R 2 ¼ 0.160/

0.002/ 0.281/ 0.287/ 0.157/
0.000) 0.164) 0.168) 0.226)
Family responsibility 0.037 (0.65)/ 20.133 (1.77)/
0.048 (0.54)/ 2 0.236 (2.08)/
0.003 (0.04) 2 0.041 (0.58)
Changeability 0.257 (3.35)/
0.290 (3.45)/
0.239 (2.29)
Family responsibility £ changeability 20.166 (2.02)/
0.202 (1.79)/
2 0.243
(2.05)
Job alternatives 0.175 (2.13)/
0.157 (1.83)/
0.273 (2.68)
Work centrality 0.442 (6.43)/ 0.259 (2.53)/
0.536 (5.52)/ 0.347 (1.88)/
0.409 (5.21) 0.209 (1.96)
Objective career success 0.212 (2.45)/
0.081 (0.64)/
0.350 (3.43)
Responsibilities,
and gender
career fields
structural models
Summary of the
311
Table IV.
JMP different ways. Whereas fathers’ careers benefit from their family role, mothers’ career
23,3 advancement suffers from additional family responsibilities (e.g. Tharenou, 1999).
Various reasons explain this disparity: traditional gender stereotypes and significant
imparities in work compensation, career-orientation and work-addiction (Snir and
Harpaz, 2006; Harpaz and Snir, 2003) lead women to assume the bigger share of family
duties. Whereas successful male managers are often expected to be paterfamilias, ideal
312 type female business professionals do not have family duties. Schoon et al. (2007) show
that for women the effects of early childbearing bring more adverse outcomes
regarding employment. These are possible causes for the small proportion in our
sample having one child or more. Accordingly, married women work fewer hours per
week than unmarried women, while married men work more hours per week than
unmarried men (Snir and Harpaz, 2006) – often due to single breadwinner
constellations.
Contrary to the model, our results do not show any influence of family
responsibilities on job alternatives. We assumed that a higher level of family
responsibilities will reduce job alternatives for in most cases spatial mobility as well
as temporal and income flexibility suffers from tight family bindings. Arguably, the
characteristics of our sample are the major reason for the lack of support. Family
and partnership obligations of young business professionals – if they exist at all –
are quite recent. Since individuals’ assessments of mobility, flexibility and
opportunities on labor markets are subject to time-consuming adaptive processes,
time lags need to be integrated into our model: it takes some years of family
experiences to realize that degrees of freedom and job alternatives diminish due to
existing family responsibilities. On a side note, the impact of age on job alternatives
might be even stronger than that of family status, and evidently both influences will
interact although we did not control for age in our sample since there is little
variance in this respect.
Job alternatives positively affect work centrality. For males this effect appears
significantly stronger than for females. Thus, our reasoning already presented can be
further elaborated. Within the career fields of business professionals, at the very least,
the assumption that tense labor markets and few job alternatives bring about longer
working hours is not supported. Again, the specifics of our sample provide some
explanations: young business professionals are hardly intimidated by unemployment
and status loss because of their high education and academic titles which work as
stable career capital independent from concrete performance. On the other hand, their
professional identity is still under construction, a process accompanied by permanent
search 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 and
Dubin, 1986), is less supported by a favorable position on the labor market (though
negative effects of unfulfilled job-expectations specifically strike women; Rindfuss
et 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 a
higher work centrality goes along with a higher level of commitment and attraction to
the organization (Carlson and Kacmar, 2000), but on the other hand this might also lead
to career vigilance and perception of a wider range of alternatives. If work is more
important than family or leisure, actors will generally broaden their evoked set of job
alternatives. Organizations which do not focus on this kind of transition risk losing Responsibilities,
their employees. career fields
Changeability positively relates to work centrality and does so equally for men and
women – there is no significant gender difference. The turbulence and dynamics of and gender
work content and professional relationships are career context factors strongly
affecting employee attitudes and behavior, more specifically, their focus of attention
(Gardner et al., 1989). From a different perspective this instrumentality is the backbone 313
of HRM concepts (e.g. job rotation, job enrichment) and motivation theories (Fox and
Feldman, 1988).
As for the moderating effect of changeability on family responsibilities’ impact on
work centrality, its strength, direction and gender-disparity is somehow
counter-intuitive and surprising:
.
The negative coefficient for the total sample shows that an increase of
changeability makes the impact of family responsibilities on work centrality
even more negative.
.
The even stronger negative male coefficient indicates that for male business
professionals who do not experience a negative impact of family responsibilities
per se and under rather stable conditions, this negative effect will occur if
changeability increases.
.
For women, it is the other way round: the moderating effect of changeability is
positive. For them, conditions of higher changeability alleviate the negative
effect of family responsibilities on work centrality.
This is an interesting finding rarely analyzed hitherto: in more changeable situations

family responsibilities obviously get more important for men, detracting energy from
the work sphere; for women, changeability weakens the negative impact of family
responsibility on work centrality. Thus one could argue that increasing dynamics of
career fields contributes to gender matching as far as family responsibilities’ impact on
work centrality is concerned. Various explanations might apply, depending on the
focus on actors or structures.
From an actor’s perspective, women seem to be better prepared for dealing with
work changeability. Recent findings show that especially parental role commitment
has direct positive effects on outcomes. Graves et al. (2007, p. 53) point out that the
parental role may provide an even greater opportunity to develop skills that are
transferable to managerial role. According to the enhancement theory of role
accumulation, 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 less
depressed, have higher self-esteem and are more satisfied with private life and job
compared to women and men who were not married, unemployed or childless (Baruch
and Barnett, 1987; Crosby, 1991). Maybe post-organizational contexts thus offer more
opportunities for women to find jobs with high temporal, social and task-flexibility as
anchors for professional identification. From a structural perspective, growing
turbulence in work environments detracts even women’s attention and energy from the
family sphere. Under conditions of rapid change women cannot afford to mainly
concentrate on family issues anymore without being in danger to loose touch with
changing job and work requirements.
JMP Work centrality is positively linked with both subjective and objective career
23,3 success, as assumed in the model. Two aspects are interesting and somehow
unexpected. First, the overall effect of work-centrality on objective is stronger than on
subjective career success. Second, the effect is stronger for women than for men. For
objective career success, prior research has revealed positive effects of time and
energy devoted to work on income and hierarchical advancement (Mannheim et al.,
314 1997; Rottenberry and Moberg, 2007). Compared with female, male work centrality is
higher rewarded, i.e. better transformed into income and power, which once again
points 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 on
dissonance theory (Festinger, 1959). Investments of time and energy into work
contribute positively to career satisfaction and subjective impressions of being
successful. The theory of self-justification (Aronson, 1992a, b) further helps to
interpret gender differences, as the impact of work centrality on subjective career
success is significantly stronger for women. As the female business professionals
of our sample are discriminated in terms of objective success, they will stronger
rely on internal justification of their investments into careers, i.e. on being
satisfied.
This theory also offers explanations for our last finding: objective career success
positively contributes to subjective career success, i.e. satisfaction and subjective
evaluation – but not for women. The assumed and obvious impact of income and
hierarchical power on career satisfaction is true only for male business professionals.
Obviously women get their career satisfaction from other sources then objective
success – and one of them is work centrality, but keeping in mind that in our sample
we are taking about younger women we should be aware of the fact that especially
midlife women strongly desire to continue and also be perceived as valuable to their
organization also in the term of objective career success indicators (Gordon and
Whelan, 1998).
Conclusions
Overall, we find clear support for effects of family responsibilities on career success.
Via work centrality, there is a negative relationship between family responsibilities
and objective and subjective career success. This result is in line with previous
research and supports current insight by demonstrating this link for an important
sample, young business professionals. Two further main results enlarge previous
findings.
There is substantive support for the effect of contextual factors (here, career fields)
for the relationship between family situations and career success. This points towards
the importance of a multi-level perspective when analyzing work-family issues.
Without taking contextual factors into account, analyses can fall short by missing
important direct and indirect effects of context factors. Concepts such as career fields
or career capitals help to bridge the different levels by providing conceptual tools for
contextual effects. For example, career capital as the symbolic capital “valid” in career
fields help to explain why the “same” portfolio of capital can have different effects
under different contextual conditions. If the rules of the game temporarily or
permanently change, e.g. by a different pace of change, available capitals can used in
different ways leading to more or less work centrality and, in turn, influencing career Responsibilities,
success. These kinds of insights on career bring along interesting perspectives for career fields
career guidance, policy and counseling.
Finally, the results provide strong support for different effects of family and gender
responsibilities 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). 315
(1) The choice explanation claims that early career decisions affect later success.
Family roles constrain especially women’s careers opportunities by imposing
geographical, temporal, or task related restrictions.
(2) The performance explanation assumes that family roles and responsibilities
differently affect the abilities of men and women to perform at work.
(3) According to the signaling explanation, the career consequences of family stem
neither from performance failures nor from choice restrictions, but from biases
of others. The granting of promotions and financial rewards is not solely based
on actual achievements, but also on signals of ability, future contributions, and
involvement.
For our sample, the choice explanation seems to be least likely as there is no
relationship between family responsibilities and job alternatives. But we have to be
aware that this is a sample which is primarily in early career stage, whereas mid- and
late career women make different choices and have other models of success (Gordon
and Whelan, 1998, p. 11). the performance explanation is supported by our data, since
family responsibilities affect the work centrality of men and women differently due to
changeability as part of the career context. Likewise, findings about the gendered
relation between work centrality and the dimensions of career success strongly
indicate the impact of signaling.
The results of this paper also have a number of practical consequences. First, given
the substantial efforts that some companies make in order to retain valued employees,
the results underscore the important relationship between external factors such as
family responsibilities and work related factors such as work centrality and career
success. Hence, in order to use the existing work force most effectively, the work-family
interface has to be focused in employee retention measures, too. Second, the results
point towards the importance of tailored HR policies. For example, for men and women
the 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 should
also try to take into account different private settings of employees and the respective
requirements for managing the work-private-interface. Third, the results also have
consequences for the political sphere. They demonstrate the importance of the external
environment – family as well as economy related – for individual career success in the
objective and subjective sense. Political regulations governing the degree of
compatibility between work and private life have a crucial impact for career related
outcomes, 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 further
career field in the European context. The debate on the relevance of family
responsibilities emerged from a focus on women, particularly women with dependent
JMP children (Fleetwood, 2007), but our results show that the practices clearly affect men
23,3 and researchers as well as practitioners need to be far more aware of the coherences in
this field. Additionally, it reveals that the gender-specific impact of family
responsibilities is significantly moderated by the dynamics of career fields. The
results and interpretation emphasize the importance of qualitative in-depth studies to
further clarify issues raised in this paper, for example the question whether women
316 perceive the moderating effect of changeability positively – for example as an
opportunity to enhance multiple role identities – or negatively – for example as
structural pressure to invest more energy into work with the implicit threat of being
hampered in their career.
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A causal model: family responsibility, career fields and career success

Family responsibility and its effects

working time arrangements reduce the perceived job alternatives. In addition, a

Work centrality and career success

Objective and subjective career success

Sample, variables and methods

Subjective career success

Objective career success

Subjective career success

Objective career success

Notes: p , 0:1; p , 0:05; * *p , 0:01 (two-tailed)

Means and standard

1. Family responsibility 0.91/ 0.913/

Instability of professional relations 1 0.821/

Career satisfaction 2 0.693/

Predictor (R 2 ¼ 0.001/ (R 2 ¼ 0.158/ (R 2 ¼ 0.195/ (R 2 ¼ 0.160/

This is an interesting finding rarely analyzed hitherto: in more changeable situations

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