Abstract: With high speed of mobility and end of life-long employment of Chinese employees, it is critical to investigate the impact of employee’s career adaptability on organizational success. However, the relationship between career adaptability and organizational success is mixed due to the so-called management dilemma of career adaptability (when the employee’s career adaptability is high, his job performance and turnover intention are also high.). Moreover, the role of career adaptability as the core of self-career management capacity among the relationships between organizational career management and individual turnover intention/job performance have not been known. So, in this study, we investigated the relationships between employee’s career adaptability and their turnover intention, and job performance, and the moderating role of tenure over these relationships. And based on the multilevel theory, we propose that career adaptability is a mediator between organizational career management and individual turnover intention/job performance. We collected data from 485 employees in 54 Chinese enterprises. Employees completed the career adaptability questionnaire at the first time wave, and completed the turnover intention questionnaire two weeks later, while one direct supervisor of each employee was also invited to complete the job performance questionnaire and organizational career management questionnaire. For data analyses, we used SEM (structural equation model), HRA (hierarchical regression analysis) and HLM (hierarchical linear model). The results of SEM showed that career adaptability was negatively correlated to turnover intention, and positively associated with supervisor-rated performance. The results of HRA showed that tenure moderated the relationships between career adaptability and turnover intention/supervisor-rated job performance. This means that the correlation between career adaptability and turnover intention was significantly negative for employees with short-tenure, but not for employees with long-tenure. The correlation between career adaptability and supervisor-rated job performance was significantly positive for employees with short-tenure, but not for employees with long-tenure. So the findings were different from the current literature. The HLM results indicated that career adaptability fully mediated the relation between organizational career management and supervisor-rated job performance, but had no mediating effect on the relation between organizational career management and turnover intention. Therefore, individual career adaptability is the key mediating variable between organizational career management and self-career management. According to the career construction theory, the complex relationships between employee’s career adaptability and organizational success (for example turnover, job performance) and individual career success (for example subjective and objective success) should be tested in the future. More moderators of the relationships between career adaptability and organizational success / individual career success should be explored. Meanwhile the mediating role of career adaptability among the relationships between organizational career management/self-career management and individual career success /organizational performance could be further explored, so that organizations could establish the career adaptability-based human resource development system by integrating organizational career management and self-career management.

Key words: career adaptability, organizational career management, hierarchical linear model, turnover intention, job performance