Exploration Career Role Enactment and Employability Evaluations: The Moderating Roles of Leader Opening and Closing Behaviours

In an increasingly volatile world, staying employable throughout the course of one’s career has become more important than ever. Whereas adaptability appears to be critical to employability, our understanding of the conditions under which employees’ work-related adaptive behaviour renders them employable in the eyes of their leaders is underdeveloped. By taking a person-supervisor fit approach, we argue that leader-rated employability is contingent on the extent to which employee adaptive behaviours are compatible with leader behaviours that either facilitate or constrain adaptability. Based on the Career Roles Model, we propose that exploration career role enactment is positively associated with leader employability evaluations. Furthermore, drawing on supplementary fit and complementary fit theory, we advance competing hypotheses about the moderating roles of leader opening and closing behaviours in the relationship between exploration career role enactment and employability evaluations. Results of a multi-source field study of Dutch leader-subordinate dyads (N = 292) indicate that exploration career role enactment is positively related to leader-rated employability. Moreover, we find support for our complementary fit hypotheses: employee enactment of exploration career roles is positively related to employability evaluations when leader behaviour complements rather than supplements employee exploratory behaviours. We conclude with theoretical and practical implications.