Organizational career management (OCM) is believed to be a useful practice to stimulate the potential of employees. However, how this can be achieved is still under investigation. This research aims to explore the mechanisms that explain the effects of OCM by clarifying its impact on employees' psychological states and their capability, based on a socially embedded model of thriving. To examine our hypotheses, we conducted a three-wave survey study with 272 full-time employees in China from diverse industries. The study lasted for three months and there was a one-month interval after each wave. We asked the participants to report OCM, career plateau and demographic variables at Time 1, their appraisal of learning and vitality at Time 2, and their self-perceived employability and job burnout at Time 3. We utilized regression analysis to examine our theoretical model and path analysis using the bias-corrected bootstrap method to test the significance of the indirect and moderation effects. The findings showed that OCM positively affected employees' learning and vitality at work, which increased their self-perceived employability and subsequently decreased job burnout. Furthermore, the effects of OCM were found to be weaker for employees with a high degree of career plateau. These findings demonstrate that OCM benefits employees by "enabling" and "energizing" them to better themselves in terms of their employment and they shed light on the boundary condition of the career plateau. Therefore, organizations may provide OCM to facilitate employees' capability and their motivation to engage in self-development, and to further enhance the effects by decreasing their perception of a career plateau.
Keywords: career plateau; job burnout; learning; organizational career management; self-perceived employability; vitality.