A Study on the Relationship between Employees’ Career Success and Subjective Well-being

Our study explores the relationship between employees’ career success and subjective well-being. Based on self-evaluative theoretical perspective, the current research introduced self- esteem as the mediator and organization-based self-esteem, social comparison as moderators to reveal the “black box” of the relationship. Data collected from multi-phase data from from 236 employees in an IT company (study 1) and cross-sectional data from 114 MBA students (study 2) provided supported for our hypotheses: (1) Employees’ subjective/objective career success was positively related to his/her subjective well-being; (2) The positive link between employees’ subjective/objective career success and subjective well-being was partially mediated by employees’ self-esteem; (3) Employees’ organization-based self-esteem strengthened the correlation between employees’ subjective career success and employees’ self-esteem; (4) Employees’ social comparison orientation weakened the relationship between employee’s self- esteem a...