Career Empowerment: Developing and Validating a Scale for a New Construct

We developed a construct of career empowerment that represents individual perceptions of control over one's career. Careers are increasingly understood to be agentic, but the explicit conceptualization of the issue of control and agency is still limited. As such, we conducted scale development and validation of a measure to capture the construct. The results of the factor analyses reflected the multidimensional nature of the construct, which consists of seven factors: self-determination, competence, impact, meaning, focus, growth, and relationships. We also demonstrated the convergent and discriminant validity of the measure, linking it to concepts such as career adaptability, job satisfaction, and turnover intentions. Practical and theoretical implications of these findings were discussed.