Organizational Career Management as a Developmental System: Collective Leadership Behaviors and the Enactment of Career Support

Abstract

Career development spans higher education through post-entry adaptation, retention, and transition. Organizational career management (OCM) links human resource management, career attitudes, and employability, yet lacks a coherent account of how organizational provisions become concrete developmental experience in daily work. This article re-specifies OCM as a developmental system comprising four layers: OCM as superordinate architecture, developmental HR practices as implementation infrastructure, developmental networks as a relational access layer, and proactive career behaviors/career self-management (CSM) as self-regulatory behaviors conditioned by institutional and relational support. The central contribution is proposing collective leadership behaviors (CLB) as a candidate for specifying the missing workplace-practice layer. Developmental networks explain who employees turn to for support; CLB explains how support is enacted in team interaction so that organizational provision becomes developmentally usable. CLB is treated not as shared leadership or a substitute for supervisor support, but as enacted workplace practice once institutional provision and relational access are in place. Because empirical studies linking CLB to career development remain limited, this framework advances as a theory-building integrative review: developmental networks matter most when the bottleneck is access to heterogeneous support, whereas CLB matters most when support exists but is not yet enacted as usable developmental experience.

1. Introduction

Career development is increasingly understood as a long-term process that extends beyond self-understanding and choice during higher education to include the transition to employment, post-entry workplace adaptation, retention, growth, and career transitions over time. This shift signals the limits of treating career development solely as a matter of individual decision-making and agency. Contemporary career research treats career success, career self-management, employability, career shocks, career transitions, and sustainable careers as interconnected agendas, emphasizing not only individual agency but also the organizational contexts, relational resources, and everyday support practices that shape careers (Arthur et al., 2005; Ng et al., 2005; Forrier et al., 2015; Akkermans & Kubasch, 2017; Akkermans et al., 2020; De Vos et al., 2020, 2021; van der Heijden et al., 2020; Spurk et al., 2019).

From this perspective, organizational career management (OCM) has gained renewed importance. OCM has traditionally been understood as the set of institutional support practices—training, rotation, mentoring, appraisal—that organizations provide to facilitate employees’ career development. Recent research has repositioned it as a broader bridging concept linking human resource management, career attitudes, career development, and employability. Scale development work in the new career era showed that OCM extends beyond training to encompass boundaryless work, diversification, and work–life balance policies (Zhou et al., 2022). Recent reviews have further distinguished OCM practices from employees’ perceptions of those practices, while bibliometric evidence suggests that OCM research has expanded into broader clusters related to human resources and organizational career management, career attitudes and individual development, and organizational support (Bagdadli & Gianecchini, 2019; Zhao et al., 2022; Yılmaz, 2026).

Three persistent gaps remain. First, research on organizational practices, relational resources, proactive career behaviors, and team interaction has accumulated under different theoretical vocabularies, leaving no integrated framework for understanding institutions, relationships, enacted practices, and behaviors as a single developmental process. Second, everyday workplace interaction remains undertheorized within OCM research, even though post-entry adaptation, role transition, retention, and growth depend heavily on what happens inside ongoing work. Third, proactive career behaviors are still too often reduced to an individual-responsibility account, with limited linkage to the institutional, relational, and interactional conditions that enable them.

Answering this question requires more than adding variables to existing OCM models. It requires specifying how organizational career support is translated into developmental experience in everyday work. Developmental networks clarify relational access to developmental support, but they do not fully explain how such support is enacted as usable guidance and coordination in ongoing interaction. This article therefore introduces CLB as a candidate concept for specifying the workplace-practice layer of OCM.

1.1. Foundational Positions

This article takes four positions. First, it rereads OCM from an institutional account—asking, “What does the organization provide?”—as a developmental-systems account—asking, “Through what developmental processes does organizational support shape post-entry adaptation, role transition, retention, and growth?” OCM should therefore be understood not as a bundle of discrete practices but as a superordinate developmental architecture. Developmental HR practices are analytically narrower: they are the implementation infrastructure through which that architecture becomes concrete. Keeping the two distinct prevents OCM from collapsing back into a mere inventory of HR provisions.

The second position is to avoid treating organizational support and individual agency as binary opposites. Proactive career behaviors arise not from personality or motivation alone but are conditioned by growth-supportive HR practices, access to developmental relationships, and everyday support practices in the workplace. Proactive career behaviors and CSM should be reconceived as self-regulatory behaviors supported by institutional, relational, and interactional conditions.

The third position is to introduce CLB not as a replacement for adjacent constructs but as a bounded candidate concept for the workplace-practice layer missing from prior OCM integration efforts. CLB is proposed to capture the enactment of support, direction, and coordination within teams once institutional provision and relational access are in place.

The fourth position is to frame this article as a theory-building integrative conceptual review—not a conceptual overview or textbook synthesis. The aim is to connect fragmented research streams, constrain the explanatory roles assigned to the focal concepts, and generate propositions that are testable in ways that can also challenge the framework.

1.2. Purpose and Organization

This article pursues one primary objective and two secondary objectives. The primary objective is to specify the workplace-practice layer that is missing in OCM theorizing and, on that basis, to reconceptualize OCM as a developmental system. The secondary objectives are to integrate developmental HR practices, developmental networks, and proactive career behaviors/CSM within that framework, and to position CLB as a theoretically distinct candidate concept whose value depends on clearer conceptual boundaries and more discriminant propositions.

Section 2 maps the development of the OCM concept. Section 3 positions developmental HR practices as the implementation infrastructure of OCM. Section 4 addresses developmental networks as a relational access layer. Section 5 reorganizes proactive career behaviors and CSM. Section 6 explains why existing OCM integration fails to capture everyday support practices, clarifies the conceptual boundary of CLB vis-a-vis adjacent constructs, and positions CLB as the workplace practice layer. Section 7 presents the integrated multilevel process model and formalizes proposition-generating pathways. Section 8 and Section 9 address future research agendas and practical implications.

1.3. Review Approach and Literature Selection

This article is a theory-building integrative conceptual review, not a systematic review or bibliometric review. Its purpose is not to compile exhaustive inventories but to connect the concept clusters necessary to specify the proposed developmental-system argument, its boundary conditions, and its points of possible empirical challenge. The evaluative standard is therefore not exhaustiveness alone but whether the review assembles, in a traceable way, the literature needed to justify role placement within the framework.

Core literature was identified through targeted keyword searches and citation tracing in Web of Science, PsycINFO, Scopus, and Google Scholar. Primary search terms included “organizational career management”, “developmental HR practices”, “developmental networks”, “proactive career behavior”, “career self-management”, “collective leadership”, and “shared leadership”. These search terms were aligned with the five focal concept clusters and were used to identify sources that clarified the functional placement of each construct within the proposed framework. Accordingly, sources were prioritized when they helped specify whether a construct primarily explained institutional provision, implementation infrastructure, relational access, workplace enactment, self-regulatory behavior, or career-development outcomes. The main search window covered literature from 2000 onward, while foundational theoretical works were included regardless of date. To improve traceability, recent reviews and focal articles were used explicitly as seed texts for backward and forward citation chaining rather than as background reading alone.

The focal concept clusters were limited to five: (1) OCM, (2) developmental HR practices, (3) developmental networks, (4) proactive career behaviors/CSM, and (5) collective/shared leadership behaviors. Inclusion was guided by functional relevance to the article’s argument: studies were prioritized when they clarified role placement within the proposed framework (superordinate architecture, implementation infrastructure, relational access, workplace practice, self-regulatory behavior, or outcome), when they helped specify temporal or multilevel processes, or when they sharpened conceptual boundaries around CLB. Domains intentionally excluded included detailed reviews of dyadic mentoring, comprehensive reviews of job crafting, the clinical specifics of career counseling and vocational psychology, and macro-level HRM-performance research. Because the article does not follow a systematic protocol, selection bias cannot be entirely eliminated; this remains a limitation of the review type.

2. Achievements of Organizational Career Management Research

2.1. The Development of the OCM Concept: From Institution to Developmental System

OCM was originally framed as a bundle of organizational practices designed to support employee careers, such as assessment, training, mentoring, and job rotation (Baruch, 1999; Sturges et al., 2005; Guan et al., 2015). As career theory moved beyond internal labor market assumptions, however, this practice-bundle view became too narrow, and recent work has expanded OCM toward a broader developmental environment that includes boundaryless work, work–life balance, diversification, and other conditions supporting long-term career formation (Zhou et al., 2022; Yılmaz, 2026).

This broadening shifts the theoretical question from what support practices an organization provides to how such provisions become consequential for post-entry adaptation, retention, and growth. It also makes perceived OCM increasingly important, because employees may not benefit from developmental provisions unless those provisions are recognized and experienced as accessible career support (Guan et al., 2015).

Yet even this expanded view remains better at cataloguing what organizations provide than at explaining how those provisions take hold as developmental experience in the course of everyday work. This gap in translation is what the present article sets out to address.

2.2. OCM Components, Measurement, and Positioning as an HRD Concept

A second achievement of OCM research is the multidimensionalization of the construct. Recent work shows that OCM encompasses a broad developmental context rather than only training provision, thereby strengthening its relevance to HRD as a career-development concept (Zhou et al., 2022; Yılmaz, 2026). At the same time, this broader scope sharpens an analytic distinction central to the present argument: OCM refers to the overarching developmental logic through which organizations support careers, whereas developmental HR practices refer to the concrete implementation infrastructure through which that logic is enacted. Without that distinction, OCM risks being reduced again to the very practice inventory that recent scholarship has tried to move beyond.

Once that distinction is made, the remaining theoretical task is no longer to show that organizations provide support, but to trace how that support reaches employees as relational access, gets taken up in workplace interaction, and ultimately shapes career development.

2.3. Major Outcomes and Remaining Challenges

OCM research has linked organizational career support to outcomes such as career satisfaction, commitment, turnover intention, employability, learning, vitality, and burnout reduction (Guan et al., 2015; De Vos et al., 2009; Kong et al., 2012; Xie et al., 2023). These findings establish that OCM matters, but they also imply that its effects are unlikely to operate through a single mechanism and instead extend across a broader outcome space encompassing objective and subjective career success, sustainable careers, and long-term employability (Ng et al., 2005; Spurk et al., 2019; De Vos et al., 2020).

What remains underdeveloped, however, is the mechanism layer linking organizational provisions to these outcomes. Existing OCM research is stronger on practices and outcomes than on the everyday workplace processes through which support becomes developmentally usable. In particular, practices, relational resources, and proactive career behaviors have largely accumulated in separate streams, leaving insufficient theorization of the workplace practice layer needed to explain post-entry adaptation, retention, and growth.

Taken together, OCM research has established the importance of organizational career support, broadened the construct, and clarified key outcomes. What it has not yet explained with equal precision is how organizational provisions are translated into relational access and enacted workplace support. An OCM framework can identify developmental resources and their likely outcomes, but it remains theoretically incomplete if it does not also explain how those resources become usable developmental experience in ongoing work. This unresolved mechanism problem is the point at which developmental networks and CLB become theoretically necessary.

3. Developmental HR Practices as HRD Infrastructure

3.1. Conceptual Clarification

Developmental HR practices should be understood as the concrete cluster of HR practices operating at the implementation level of OCM. Whereas OCM represents the overarching design philosophy and strategic direction of career support, developmental HR practices constitute the practical infrastructure—the bundle of individual policies and actions that instantiate that direction.

Van De Voorde and Beijer (2022) organized developmental HR practices as a cluster designed to support employees’ capabilities, motivation, behaviors, and wellbeing over the long term. Training and development, career development, and the provision of growth opportunities constitute their core. These practices are not one-off programs or appraisal systems; they represent a developmentally oriented design principle—how organizations support employees’ continued growth toward the future (Van De Voorde & Beijer, 2022). Yang et al. (2025a) position developmental HR practices as the organizational context supporting employees’ sustainable employability. Liu et al. (2022), drawing on social exchange and signal theory, demonstrate that organizational support signals, “This organization values my growth,” which facilitates proactive behavior.

The major effect attracting recent attention is the facilitation of proactive career behaviors. Yang et al. (2025a) demonstrated that the relationship between developmental HR practices and sustainable employability is mediated by proactive career behaviors—when organizations establish developmentally oriented practices, employees become better positioned to act with a view toward the future. Liu et al. (2022) showed that developmental HR practices not only directly enhance career self-management but that transformational leadership strengthens this effect. Developmental HR practices have also been associated with intermediate states such as well-being, thriving, and agility, suggesting they support not only capability formation but also the energetic infrastructure that enables behavioral activation (Yang et al., 2025b).

3.2. Positioning as an Activation Condition for OCM

OCM and developmental HR practices are distinct concepts but are strongly connected theoretically. In this article, OCM is treated as the superordinate developmental architecture that captures how organizations design career support, whereas developmental HR practices are the implementation-level cluster through which that architecture becomes concrete. From an HRD perspective, developmental HR practices are therefore not synonymous with OCM; they are the practical infrastructure through which OCM is enacted. Collapsing OCM into developmental HR practices would re-narrow a developmental-system concept into a practice bundle and obscure the distinction between superordinate architecture and implementation infrastructure (Zhou et al., 2022; Van De Voorde & Beijer, 2022).

Perceived OCM is known to associate with career satisfaction and turnover intention (Guan et al., 2015). But for such perceptions to form, employees need to have actually experienced developmentally supportive practices—training, rotation, support, work–life balance. Developmental HR practices are therefore positioned here not merely as a peripheral concept but as the practical infrastructure that activates the developmental system and makes OCM perceptible in everyday organizational life (Liu et al., 2022; Yang et al., 2025a).

4. Developmental Networks as Relational Resources

Research on interpersonal career support has long centered on the dyadic mentor–protégé relationship. As careers have become more cross-boundary, diverse, and non-linear, however, single-relationship models can no longer adequately explain contemporary career realities. de Janasz and Sullivan (2004) argued that a multiple mentoring perspective is needed in an increasingly complex occupational world, where combinations of multiple supportive relationships sustain individual development (de Janasz & Sullivan, 2004; Allen et al., 2004).

The developmental network perspective of Higgins and Kram (2001) represented a major theoretical advance. Criticizing prior mentoring research for over-focusing on one-to-one relationships, they argued that career development should be understood as a collection of developmental relationships with multiple others, redefining developmental networks as networks of people who take an interest in the individual’s career and provide advice, support, stimulation, and role modeling. Dobrow et al. (2012) synthesized this research and showed how mentoring scholarship has expanded from dyadic relationships to networked developmental relationships, raising the need to incorporate mutuality among network members.

4.1. Components and Support Quality

The basic elements of developmental networks include network size, network diversity, and the quality of support from each relationship. Higgins and Kram (2001) suggested that the number and diversity of supporters—their dispersion across different roles, statuses, organizations, and contexts—determine the range of accessible advice, information, and opportunities. Dobrow et al. (2012) cautioned, however, that simply increasing the number of relationships cannot fully explain developmental value; the nature of relationships and their mutuality must be incorporated.

Chollet et al. (2021) conceptualize developmental networks as subjective career relationships, arguing that the value of a network depends not only on its objective structure but also on how individuals make meaning of those relationships and experience them as developmental support. Even when organizations have practices in place, employees who lack access to meaningful developmental relationships may find it difficult to experience their organization as a place that supports their growth (Chollet et al., 2021).

4.2. OCM and Developmental Networks: The Interface Between Institution and Relational Resources

Organizational practices can establish the conditions for developmental network formation. When organizations provide training, job rotation, cross-functional opportunities, and mentoring programs, employees gain opportunities to contact new others and build developmentally supportive relationships. Higgins and Kram (2001) theoretically demonstrated that network structures are influenced by organizational context and career situations; Dobrow et al. (2012) organized how developmental networks are shaped by contextual conditions as well as individual agency.

Developmental networks can accordingly be positioned as a mediating resource between organizational practices and individual career outcomes. Within the framework of this article, they specify the relational access through which employees connect to developmental support. This access layer, however, does not by itself explain how support becomes usable in everyday work; that enactment problem is developed more fully in Section 6 through the concept of CLB (Higgins & Kram, 2001; Dobrow et al., 2012; Chollet et al., 2021).

5. Reorganizing Individual Proactive Career Behavior

5.1. Proactive Career Behaviors and Career Self-Management

Contemporary career research has repeatedly emphasized the importance of employees acting proactively toward their own futures. Such behaviors are generally termed proactive career behaviors—voluntary actions that explore future career opportunities, engage in necessary learning and network formation, and enhance career prospects and growth potential (Seibert et al., 1999, 2001; Crant, 2000; Parker et al., 2010; Yang et al., 2025a). Career competencies research has further demonstrated that capabilities related to self-reflection, networking, adaptability, and opportunity exploration are important for career outcomes (Kuijpers et al., 2006; De Vos et al., 2011; Akkermans et al., 2013; Rudolph et al., 2017; Blokker et al., 2019; Grosemans et al., 2021).

This understanding connects deeply to career self-management (CSM) research. Hirschi and Koen (2021) summarized contemporary career orientations and CSM research, arguing that career formation is increasingly understood as self-directed, values-driven, and flexible. CSM refers to the process through which individuals self-regulate their career goals, values, and behaviors—a chain of continuous adjustment and action (Raabe et al., 2007; Hirschi & Koen, 2021).

Proactive career behaviors and CSM are not synonymous. Hirschi and Koen (2021) argued that while CSM is a broad self-regulation process encompassing cognition, emotion, motivation, and behavior, proactive career behaviors refer specifically to the more visible behavioral dimension. Talluri et al. (2024) reorganized career competencies from a self-regulation theory perspective, arguing that individuals pursue desired career outcomes while regulating cognition, motivation, affect, and behavior. In this article, CSM is positioned as the superordinate self-regulation process, while proactive career behaviors are the behavioral dimension expressed within that process.

Traditional research on proactive career behaviors has often explained them primarily through individual factors. This alone, however, cannot explain why people with similar characteristics differ in their behavioral activation depending on workplace context. Recent theoretical work has moved toward understanding proactive career behaviors as self-regulation processes rather than personality expressions (Verbruggen & De Vos, 2020; Kim & Yoon, 2025; Klehe et al., 2021). Parker et al.’s (2006, 2010) proactive motivation framework demonstrates that proactive behavior depends on motivational states such as can-do, reason-to, and energized-to, opening theoretical connections to organizational support and relational resources. Klehe et al. (2021) further argue that agency arises not as individual responsibility disconnected from environment but through the interaction of support, meaning-making, and energizing.

5.2. Linkage with OCM and Developmental Networks

Yang et al. (2025a) demonstrate that developmental HR practices connect to sustainable employability via the mediation of proactive career behaviors—confirming that organizationally supportive practices are contextual factors that elicit proactive behavior. Agency should not be understood as opposing organizational support; it is activated by supportive environments (Yang et al., 2025a). Liu et al. (2022) further demonstrate that developmental HR practices positively influence career self-management and that transformational leadership is involved in this process.

Proactive career behaviors cannot, therefore, be understood apart from OCM and developmental networks. OCM is the institutional and perceptual context that provides employees with growth opportunities; developmental networks are the mediating layer through which that support is experienced as concrete relational resources. But a developmental-systems account is still incomplete if it stops there. Proactive career behaviors also depend on how support is made actionable in the texture of ongoing work. Without specifying that workplace-practice layer, OCM theory can explain where developmental resources come from and who may access them, but not how those resources are converted into actual developmental experience during post-entry adaptation, role transition, and everyday growth.

6. Why Existing Models Are Insufficient: Describing the Practice Layer Through Collective Leadership Behaviors

The concepts discussed so far—developmental HR practices, developmental networks, and proactive career behaviors/CSM—sketch a meaningful integrated picture of OCM. Yet one question remains insufficiently answered: how does organizational career support become concrete developmental experience in the flow of daily work? To answer that question without concept crowding, this article separates three analytically distinct mediating tasks: provision, access, and enactment.

Provision concerns what the organization actually supplies. This is the domain of OCM as developmental architecture and developmental HR practices as implementation infrastructure. Access concerns who employees can turn to for heterogeneous developmental support. This is the domain of developmental networks as a relational access layer. Enactment concerns how available support is translated into usable guidance, coordination, and mutual adjustment in day-to-day work. It is this third task that remains undertheorized in OCM.

This distinction matters most in post-entry adaptation, role transition, retention, and growth. Even when training systems, rotation opportunities, mentoring policies, and career consultation systems are in place, whether those become lived growth opportunities depends on whether support actually reaches employees through the interactions that constitute their working day. A developmental-system theory of OCM is therefore incomplete if it can specify institutional provision and relational access but cannot specify the workplace practices through which support becomes usable.

CLB is introduced to address that enactment task. Supervisor support and transformational leadership remain relevant, but they primarily explain vertical and dyadic influence. Shared leadership also remains relevant, but it is usually used to explain the distribution of influence within a team. The present article requires a more proximal concept: enacted support, direction, and coordination behaviors through which members shape one another’s work in everyday interaction. In that narrower sense, CLB is proposed as a candidate workplace-practice concept rather than as a replacement for shared leadership.

This logic clarifies why CLB should not be collapsed into developmental networks. Developmental networks explain access: who is connected to whom and where developmental support may be obtained. CLB explains enactment: how support, once accessible in principle, is mobilized through routine support, direction, and coordination. The two layers may reinforce one another, but they answer different theoretical questions.

The argument for CLB in OCM is therefore bounded in role terms. OCM and developmental HR practices explain provision; developmental networks explain access; CLB explains enactment—the workplace-practice step through which institutional support becomes something employees can actually draw on in daily work. Shared leadership is not rejected, but repositioned as a team-level distributional concept that does not by itself specify this enacted layer. These distinctions are summarized in

Table 1. Comparative placement of adjacent constructs in the proposed OCM developmental system.

Construct	Representative Source	Primary Level	Best Explains	Does Not Primarily Explain
OCM	Zhao et al. (2022)	Organizational architecture	The overall developmental design through which the organization supports careers	How support is enacted in day-to-day work
Developmental HR practices	Van De Voorde and Beijer (2022)	Implementation infrastructure	Concrete developmental provisions such as training, rotation, and growth-supportive opportunities	Relational access or enacted support inside ongoing interaction
Developmental networks	Higgins and Kram (2001)	Relational access	Who employees can turn to for heterogeneous developmental support	How support is enacted once access already exists
Supervisor support	—	Dyadic vertical relation	Support and guidance from a formal leader	Lateral or distributed enactment among team members
Shared leadership	Pearce and Conger (2003)	Team-level distribution	How influence is dispersed across members	Concrete response patterns through which support becomes usable in work interaction
CLB	Fujimoto et al. (2026)	Workplace- practice layer	Enacted support, direction, and coordination in ongoing interaction	Institutional provision or relational access by itself

Note. The sources listed in the table indicate representative works used to position each construct within the proposed role-based comparison. The supervisor-support row is included as an adjacent construct for conceptual comparison, although the present article does not provide a separate review of the supervisor-support literature. The table is not intended as an exhaustive taxonomy of the respective literature.

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6.1. Theoretical Foundations of Shared/Collective Leadership

Shared leadership has been understood as the dispersion of leadership functions among team members rather than their concentration in a single formal leader (Pearce & Conger, 2003). Recent research further shows that such dispersion is dynamic, context-sensitive, and linked to team conditions such as shared purpose, trust, social support, task complexity, and job resources (Carson et al., 2007; Wang et al., 2014; Nicolaides et al., 2014; D’Innocenzo et al., 2016; Zhu et al., 2018; Müller et al., 2023; Abson et al., 2024; Karppi et al., 2024, 2025). This literature is important background for the present article because it clarifies why distributed influence matters, but it does not by itself specify the enacted workplace-practice step through which developmental support becomes usable in ongoing work.

Within this stream, Fujimoto et al. (2026) identify behavioral microfoundations of collective leadership and develop the Scale of Collective Leadership Behaviors (SCLB). Related work has further articulated a micro-foundational behavioral explanation of CLB within HRM (Fujimoto, 2026). These studies are useful here because they shift attention from leadership as a team property alone to leadership as member-enacted behavior. The present article takes a further conceptual step by importing that behavioral emphasis into OCM and using CLB as a candidate concept for the enactment task identified above.

6.2. Connecting CLB with Career Development: The Theoretical Differential of This Article

OCM and developmental HR practices support employees’ career development as organization-level institutions and practices. Whether those practices reach employees as developmental experience, however, depends substantially on everyday team interaction. In teams where CLB is enacted, members mutually support, direct, and coordinate one another’s work in ways that can make organizational provisions more usable as concrete developmental support. The argument is intentionally bounded: CLB is proposed as a plausible workplace-practice layer for outcomes that are relatively proximal to work experience—especially post-entry adaptation, role transition, retention-related embeddedness, and the activation of career self-management—rather than as a direct explanation of all forms of objective career success.

CLB may also facilitate the formation and use of developmental networks. A context in which members share information, offer advice, and coordinate roles overlaps with conditions under which developmentally supportive relationships can form and become practically useful. Yet this possible linkage should not be over-specified. The present article does not assume a fixed sequence in which developmental networks precede CLB or vice versa. Instead, it proposes that relational access and workplace practice are distinct but potentially complementary layers whose interaction remains an open empirical question. A sharper expectation, however, is that developmental networks should be comparatively more consequential when the main problem is access to heterogeneous developmental resources, whereas CLB should be comparatively more consequential when employees already have access to support but still need that support to be enacted in routine work.

From these considerations, the article’s theoretical differential is straightforward: not replacing OCM with CLB, but sharpening OCM by specifying a missing workplace-practice layer. For HRD research, this implies that development should not be limited to preparing formal leaders or installing support systems; it should also examine whether members enact mutual support, direction, and coordination in ways that make organizational career support usable.

7. Integrative Analysis: Proposing a Multilevel Process Model

7.1. The Fragmented Structure of Existing Research

As the preceding discussion has shown, OCM research, HRD research, and career behavior research have each accumulated as independent streams. OCM research has demonstrated relationships between institutions and outcomes; developmental HR practices research has shown pathways to employability via proactive behavior; developmental networks research has demonstrated the importance of relational resources. These streams, however, have not been interconnected. OCM and developmental HR practices are typically measured at the organizational level, career self-management and proactive career behaviors at the individual level, developmental networks as individual-experienced relational resources, and shared/collective leadership as a team-level process. Because institutions, relationships, behaviors, and leadership have accumulated at different levels, frameworks for capturing them as a single developmental process have been lacking (Kim & Yoon, 2025; Higgins & Kram, 2001).

7.2. Proposing the Integrated Model

In light of this fragmentation, this article proposes the integrative multilevel process model shown in Figure 1. The model is designed to do one thing clearly: specify the workplace-practice layer that sits between institutional support and self-regulatory career behavior. For interpretive clarity, the framework distinguishes four non-equivalent roles: OCM as superordinate developmental architecture, developmental HR practices as implementation infrastructure, developmental networks as relational access layer, and CLB as enacted workplace-practice layer.

The starting point of the model is OCM as the superordinate developmental architecture. Developmental HR practices occupy the implementation level within that architecture; they are the concrete means through which organizations create growth-supportive opportunities and signals. This distinction matters because collapsing OCM into developmental HR practices would return the concept to a practice inventory and obscure the difference between institutional architecture and implementation infrastructure. Organizational practices are therefore positioned not as background conditions but as activation conditions for the career development process.

Organizational support does not connect directly to career development by itself. Between institutions and self-regulatory action lie two analytically distinct mediating layers—developmental networks and CLB. Developmental networks function as a relational access structure to multiple developmental relationships. CLB functions as the workplace-practice layer through which support, direction, and coordination become usable in ongoing work. The parallel specification is not meant to imply equal relevance in all contexts. Rather, developmental networks should matter more when the primary bottleneck is access to heterogeneous developmental support, whereas CLB should matter more when support is already accessible in principle but must still be converted into workable guidance during post-entry adaptation, role transition, and daily coordination.

The empirical verification of each pathway—including the comparative relevance of the two mediating layers—remains a task for future research. This article positions the integrative framework as a theoretical proposal. Research directly verifying each pathway remains limited, but each relationship is partially supported by existing individual studies. Connecting them constitutes the theoretical contribution of this article.

The integrative framework is intended to generate testable propositions rather than to present a settled causal model. Its sharpest claim concerns comparative explanatory relevance: when relational access should matter more than workplace practice, when workplace practice should matter more than relational access, and what observations would weaken that distinction.

Proposition 1. 

OCM is more likely to stimulate proactive career behaviors and proximal career-development outcomes when employees experience developmental HR practices as the coherent implementation infrastructure of a developmental system rather than as isolated HR provisions; this effect should be especially consequential in post-entry adaptation, role transition, and contexts marked by uncertain developmental pathways.

Proposition 2. 

Developmental networks should be comparatively more consequential than CLB when the primary bottleneck is limited access to diverse developmental ties, fragmented support, or insufficient exposure to heterogeneous career resources.

Proposition 3. 

CLB should be comparatively more consequential than developmental networks when developmental support is already accessible in principle but has not yet been converted into workable guidance in day-to-day coordination, role negotiation, and post-entry adaptation.

Proposition 4. 

The framework is weakened when CLB shows no incremental explanatory value beyond developmental networks and formal supervisor support, or when developmental networks predict proximal career-development outcomes equally strongly in persistently low-CLB settings.

Taken together, these propositions restate the article’s contribution in bounded terms. The article reconceptualizes OCM as a developmental system, distinguishes institutional architecture from implementation infrastructure, distinguishes relational access from workplace practice, and proposes CLB as a candidate concept for specifying the missing workplace-practice layer. The framework is intended to guide future multilevel research rather than to claim that the full model has already been verified.

8. Future Research Agenda and Limitations

8.1. Methodological Challenges

Much of the research on OCM, developmental HR practices, developmental networks, proactive career behaviors, and collective leadership still relies on cross-sectional data. Career development is inherently a time-encompassing process; cross-sectional designs alone cannot adequately clarify causal relationships. Future research calls for longitudinal designs with at least two time points, and ideally longer-term designs that track transitions across career stages (Hirschi & Koen, 2021; Yang et al., 2025a).

The integrative model assumes a multilevel structure spanning organization-level institutions, team-level interactions, and individual-level relational resources and proactive behaviors. Future research therefore requires multi-source and multilevel data. A design combining organization-side data on practice implementation, team-side data including mutual ratings of collective leadership and network density, and individual-side data on OCM perception, developmental support quality, and career self-management is desirable (Müller et al., 2023; Karppi et al., 2024; Zhou et al., 2022).

For developmental HR practices, developmental networks, and collective leadership alike, research verifying what concrete interventions enhance them and connect to career development outcomes is insufficient. A shift toward research designs capable of verifying intervenable mechanisms constitutes an additional methodological challenge (Kim & Yoon, 2025).

8.2. Theoretical Challenges

The first theoretical challenge is clarifying the causal direction between OCM and developmental networks. This article has emphasized the trajectory in which developmentally supportive practices promote network formation. Conversely, however, employees with rich developmental networks may also evaluate their organizations more favorably. Future work should model the relationship between OCM and developmental networks as a reciprocal process, not linear causation (Chollet et al., 2021).

The second challenge is at what level—individual attributes, self-regulation, or contextual response—to understand proactive career behaviors and CSM. Future theoretical research needs to distinguish agency as trait-like readiness from process-like enactment, and to clarify which aspects are cultivable and which are context-dependent (Hirschi & Koen, 2021; Talluri et al., 2024).

The third challenge is explicitly theorizing the connection between CLB and career development. Shared/collective leadership research has demonstrated associations with team effectiveness and coordination, but research directly addressing career development remains limited (Kim & Yoon, 2025). In the present article, CLB is theorized primarily as enacted workplace practice rather than as a team-level distributional property. Future research should therefore clarify its minimal observational unit more precisely—for example, as discrete episodes of mutual support, direction, and coordination; as repeated interaction patterns; or as aggregated member-enacted behavioral repertoires—and should examine how each option bears on post-entry adaptation, role transition, retention, and CSM activation.

8.3. Methodological Limitations Specific to This Article

Because this article is a conceptual integrative review, several limitations should be noted. First, despite the use of targeted searching, seed-text citation chaining, and explicit scope boundaries, the absence of a systematic review protocol means that author judgment remains involved in source selection. Second, direct empirical studies linking CLB to career development are still limited, so parts of the argument—especially the positioning of CLB as a workplace-practice layer—remain theory-building extrapolations. Third, the proposed relationship between developmental networks and CLB is intentionally proposition-generating rather than empirically settled. The framework should therefore be read as a bounded theoretical proposal designed to organize future research, not as a definitive causal model.

9. Practical Implications

9.1. Implications for Organizational Practice

The practical implication of this article is that career management must not be understood solely as a problem of institutional design. Even when companies establish training, rotation, appraisal, career consultation, and cross-boundary experiences, employees still need access to developmental relationships, and support, direction, and coordination must flow through everyday team interaction if those provisions are to reach employees as concrete growth experience. Future OCM practice should therefore treat institutional architecture, implementation infrastructure, relational access, and enacted workplace practice as an integrated whole.

9.2. Implications for Higher Education

This article also has a limited implication for higher education. Career education should move beyond self-understanding alone and help students recognize that post-entry career development depends on self-regulatory behavior, organizational support, relational resources, and everyday collaborative practice. In that sense, students can benefit from learning not only how to manage their own careers, but also how to seek, use, and contribute to developmental support within organizations. This implication is secondary to the article’s main theoretical contribution and is therefore presented cautiously.