Investigation of the effect of the career management system and succession plan on employees' work stress and feelings of entrapment.

BACKGROUND: Work stress and feeling of entrapment are harmful physical and emotional results for employees when the workload demands exceed their capacities.

OBJECTIVE: This study aims to investigate the effects of the career management system and succession plan on employees' work stress and feelings of entrapment in hopes of improving employees' well-being to promote business continuity.

METHODS: In this cross-sectional study, the convenient sampling method was adopted. The research was conducted with the participation of call center agents (n = 621) of three call centers in Turkey. The Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) path analysis was performed on the collected data for hypothesis testing.

RESULTS: Both career management systems (CMS) and succession plans (SP) reduce employees' work stress and feelings of entrapment. Work stress was found to mediate the effects of CMS and SP on the Feeling of Entrapment. The CMS reduces the work stress of employees with university degrees than those with a high school diploma. Meanwhile, SP reduces more of the feeling of entrapment for employees newly starting their jobs (with 0-2 years of seniority) than the workers with three or more years of seniority.

CONCLUSION: Empirically, the feeling of entrapment seems higher among the employees with three or more years of seniority, suggesting that human resource management should focus on employees' work stress and feeling of job insecurity issues and offer possible and timely solutions. Furthermore, organizations showing care to newly arriving staff and giving them job assurance is believed crucial to improving employees' recruitment and retention.