How Does Person-Environment Fit Relate to Career Calling? The Role of Psychological Contracts and Organizational Career Management

PURPOSE: The formation of one’s career calling involves endowing work with meaning and realizing oneself in work, and it has become a focus of organizational behavior research in the past decade. Although there are many studies on the outcome variables of career calling, research on the antecedents of career calling formation is relatively scarce, and its mechanisms are unclear. Based on fit theory and social exchange theory, we analyzed the data of 373 employees and explored the relationship between person-environment fit (focusing on person-organization fit and person-job fit), psychological contract, career calling and organizational career management. METHODS: We adopted a multi-timepoint data collection method to analyze data from 373 employees from an internet technology company. A mediated moderation model and hypotheses were tested using Mplus 8.3 software. RESULTS: The results showed that person-organization fit and person-job fit were positively related to career calling, and the psychological contract played a partial mediating role. The moderating effect of organizational career management on person-organization fit, person-job fit and the psychological contract was also confirmed. Moreover, the mediating effect of the psychological contract was stronger when organizational career management was higher. CONCLUSION: We examined the important influence of individual-level and organizational-level factors on the formation of career calling. The findings highlight the important role and mechanism of person-environment fit in the formation of career calling through psychological factors, which has managerial implications for how to develop employees’ career calling.