Extending The Human Capital Theory Of Career Success: An Empirical Test In The Ecuadorian Context

Human capital theory has traditionally been used as the primary explanation for objective career success. However, inconsistent results of the human capital-performance evaluation-objective career success relationships, as proposed in human capital theory, motivated this dissertation to further develop the theory by including economic, managerial, and institutional facets. These facets include not only an economic rational perspective, but also a managerial component that considers organizational policies and practices, as well as an institutional component that considers how environmental pressures influence objective career success. Also, boundary conditions for the proposed model are hypothesized explaining how the relationships between the constructs differ for managers and non-managers. The hypothesized relationships are tested in a Latin American context using rich proprietary data. The results of the study lend support for the managerial and institutional facets of the theory of human capital of career success. On the other hand, the economic facet was not supported due to the non-significant relationships between the human capital components and performance evaluation scores. Also, support was found for the boundary condition, rank, on performance evaluations. This finding suggests that performance evaluations are a more important consideration for the objective career success of non-managers than for managers in environments with strong socio-cultural and institutional pressures such as those found in Latin America