This research is an exploratory study which examines whether the characteristics of individuals’ career network within and outside of their organizations influence their work attitudes. Career network is defined as the network of contacts within and...
This research is an exploratory study which examines whether the characteristics of individuals’ career network within and outside of their organizations influence their work attitudes. Career network is defined as the network of contacts within and outside the organization with whom the focal person usually discusses concerning his or her career problems. Most previous social network research has limitation that it has focused only on the intra-organizational network. Therefore, it is needed to expand the research area into the extra-organizational network because individuals usually use both the intra-organizational network and the extra-organizational network in the perspective of career network. Using the data from 135 employees working in various companies, this research empirically investigated whether the characteristics of individuals’ career network within and outside of their organizations influence their work attitudes.The empirical study showed the followings: First, those who depend mostly on the extra-organizational career network tend to be less committed to their organization. Second, the individuals who are more embedded in their overall career network have a tendency to facilitate organizational citizenship behavior to the alters in their career network. According to the results, this research implies that by comprehending the characteristics of employees’ career networks, the company promotes its human resource more practically. Furthermore, this research suggested an important implication that managing employees’career network effectively draws more positive work attitudes. This study concluded that career networks are beyond organization’s boundary and bound up with work attitudes.