Protean and Boundaryless Careers and Nonprofit Leaders
Generally, it is now understood that the traditional organizational careers that emphasize linear progression within a single firm is unattainable due to the nature of the job market and that individuals (aim to) own their careers and chart their own pathways by expanding their skillset and knowledge base for professional development and better salary packages (Arthur, 2014). Proponents of other forms of careers have indicated that careers can be physically and psychologically independent from organizations. For instance, a boundaryless career orientation captures patterns of physical and psychological inter-organizational career mobility, while a protean career orientation indicates the ideas of self-motivating, directing and making choices while relying on one’s values (Volmer & Spurk, 2011). The protean career’s focus self-fulfillment through career development has been argued to lead to outcomes that include: proactivity, career adaptivity, psychological wellbeing, effective coping with uncertainty, and job career and life expectations (Baruch, 2014). Contrarily, the outcomes of the boundaryless career orientation which promotes the ideas that individuals will move throughout firms and departments frequently over the course of a career has led to mixed experiences with some scholars positing that it leads to career satisfaction to the possibilities to learn new skills with each job move, but others scholarship casts it in more negative light and argue that it creates lower career, job, and life satisfaction, and lower re-employment rates among those seeking a new job (Rodrigues, Guest, Oliveira, & Alfes, 2015)
In general, career orientation is rooted in the idea that career orientations are fairly stable career preferences that begin to take shape relatively early in life at the intersection of individual factors, including individual dispositions and work and career-related preferences, and contextual factors, such as social background and labor market circumstances (Rodrigues et al, 2015). As such, according to Rodrigues, Butler, and Guest (2019), when trying to understand “the formation of protean and boundaryless career orientations, it is important to consider the role of individual, family and social factors and to focus on individuals transitioning into the labor market” (p. 2).