Can employees capitalize upon their role breadth self-efficacy and innovative work behaviour to enhance their prospects of promotion?

Abstract

By acknowledging the role of assessing employees’ promotability in talent development and retention, along with the need to improve the understanding about its antecedents, this paper examines the impact of employees’ role breadth self-efficacy on this criterion. Specifically, it builds upon the integration of previous theoretical developments regarding the motivational virtues of role breadth self-efficacy at work, with the core assumptions of Spence’s signalling theory to empirically test whether innovative work behaviour acts as an underlying mechanism of the link between role breadth self-efficacy and promotability. Relying upon a time-lagged design with multisource data (employees and respective supervisors), evidence obtained from a sample of N = 185 software engineers supported the indirect effect of role breadth self-efficacy on supervisors’ ratings of employees’ promotability, via employees’ innovative work behaviour. The main theoretical and applied contributions of these findings are presented and discussed in the context of human resource management.