‘Who's to blame?’ matters: The role of attributions in employees' emotional and behavioural responses to career inaction

Abstract Career inaction, or failing to act adequately for a period of time to make a desired change in one's career, is quite common in the workplace. Despite this, research regarding how it affects employees at work is very limited. Using attribution theory and stress research, we propose an integrated view of how employees interpret and respond to career inaction differently. Specifically, we establish the idea of blame attributions for career inaction (i.e., self‐ and other‐directed blame attribution) and investigate how they relate to employees' emotional and behavioural responses to career inaction. We conducted three studies to address the research questions: a scenario‐based experiment with 315 workers, a three‐wave survey with 302 full‐time employees and a daily diary study of 123 hospital nurses across five consecutive working days. The findings revealed that when faced with career inaction, employees who blame themselves are more likely to experience anxiety, while those who blame others tend to experience anger. Anxiety and anger are further linked to work withdrawal and interpersonal deviance respectively. Overall, we contribute to the advancement of career inaction theory and career management practices.