Relationship between competencies and career competencies

Our results demonstrated that leadership competencies displayed significant positive relationship with career competencies, leadership competencies predicted leadership competencies, and our model explained 48% of the variance in career competencies. Indicating that development of competencies in one domain shows significant correlation with the development of competencies in another domain (Sternberg, 2005), and mastering on leadership competencies fosters development of career competencies.

This finding is in line with the literature, which suggests that mastering on competencies fosters proactive behaviors (Cates, 2014), proactive personality is linked to career success (Seibert, Crant & Kraimer, 1999), and proactive individuals engage career management (Crant, 2000).

This finding also supported the principles of SCC theory, which states that people may form lasting interests in career focused activities when they experience personal competence and positive outcomes (Lent et al., 1994). In addition, our finding also supported the principles of COR theory (Hobfoll, 2002), which states that so-called resource caravans may develop in which resources can create additional resources. That is, as an individual gain and develop leadership competencies or in the view COR theory new resources, he/she tends to invest these resources in order to gain additional resources such as career competencies.

5.5.5. Theoretical implications

Our study is one of the limited number of studies conducted in the military context which tested the principles of JD-R theory (Bakker & Demerouti, 2014). In addition, our study was

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the first to integrate perceived professional authenticity in specific competencies in the JD-R model. With our findings, we showed that mastering on competencies affects the perception of work conditions and work engagement, high level of competence results with high level of work engagement through perception of role clarity, and depending on the individual differences, some job resources (i.e., social support) may turn in to a stressor.

Another important theoretical aspect of this study is related role of leadership competencies on career competencies. Our results demonstrated that leadership competencies displayed a significant positive relationship with career competencies. Suggesting that mastering on job specific competencies leads to development of career specific competencies.

5.5.6. Limitations of the study

Our study has some limitations. First, we conducted our study with limited number of participants that was not enough to quantitatively represent the organization that we were studying. Second, our participants were officers who have the proficiency level (advanced).

However, in this organization there are officers different statues (officers, noncomissioned officers, civilian officilals, enlisted men, ect.) and different proficiency levels in this statues in military organizations, in that sense, we are unable to generalize from the current results. Third, as we studied a limited set of job demands and resources we cannot conclude about the possible influence or relevance of other job demands and resources. Moreover, the generalizability of the current findings to other, omnipresent or organization-specific (army, navy, air force) job characteristics need to be demonstrated. Fourth, we used JD-R model as theoretical framework and examined the role of competencies on perception of work conditions and work engagement, whereas we did not include job crafting in our examination. The inclusion of job crafting into the study would be relevant and the results could have been more fruitful to see the role of competencies on the entire JD-R model. For example, it could be interesting to study job crafting in the scope of leadership, JD-R model and competencies. Fifth, as all data were gathered through self-reports, in one single point in time, common method variance might contaminate the results. Finally, due to the limited sample size, some sophisticated statistical tools were not used.

5.5.7.! Practical implications

Our results suggest that perceived job resources lead to increased work engagement. This means that in order to create a healthier and more motivated personal, military organizations

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should focus on positively valued aspects of the workplace and design more resourceful organizational environment.

Our results also suggested that perceived competence was positively related to work engagement and career competencies. This means that besides aspects of the workplace, aspect of the person is related to work engagement, and to create a positive effect on well-being and motivation, military organizations should focus on training more competent personel. This will foster mobilization of job resources, keep personal engaged, and, in turn, result with engagement and performance. Further, developing competence will foster career competencies which is also found to be important for motivational processes as well as career development and relevant concept in stimulating well-being in the workplace. It is important to underline that while desiging organizational environment, in order not to creat unexpected stress resources, military organizations should focus on proficiency level of the personal.

5.5.8. Conclusion

The purpose of modern competency-based human resources management is to reach maximum performance, and research showed that work engagement (Bakker, 2011) and career competencies are correlates of performance (Akkermans et al, 2013a). In this study, we investigated the role of leadership competencies on work engagement and career competencies by using JD-R model (Demerouti & Bakker, 2014) and Career Competencies model (Akkermans et al, 2013a) as theoretical frameworks. As hypothesized, we found that perceived competence affects the perception of work conditions and associates with work engagement and career competencies.

The positive relationship between perceived competence, work engagement and career competencies is the result of satisfaction of basic needs (Deci & Ryan, 2000) and development of self-efficacy (Lent et al., 1994; Cates, 2014). It is likely that as the proficiency level increases, on one hand, the basic need for competence and autonomy are satisfied, and result with motivation in the form of work engagement, on the other hand, perception of self-efficacy increases and leads to career interest.

In conclusion, this study has provided a support for understanding of role of competencies at work place. Our results showed that mastering on competencies affects the perception of work conditions, and fosters work engagement and career competencies. Indicating that competencies result with performance not only through demonstration of critical behaviour, but also fostering work engagement and career competencies. These results also underline the value

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of investigating role of related factors on work engagement and research on drivers of career competencies.