Success with a split face: Investigating how and when subjective career success drives both employee career crafting and workplace incivility

Abstract By predominantly emphasizing the positive behavioral outcomes of subjective career success, existing research is limited in its ability to capture the potentially divergent consequences of such personal accomplishments. To address this limitation, we draw on the cognitive‐motivational‐relational theory of emotion and a dual‐faceted, functional conceptualization of pride to construct and test an integrated model. In this framework, subjective career success is proposed to be associated with both positive and negative employee behavioral outcomes through the experience of dual‐faced pride emotions. Furthermore, we posit that the extent to which these pride emotions are experienced is a function of employees' self‐conception traits related to achievement experiences, namely, genuine self‐esteem and grandiose narcissism. Using multi‐wave data collected from China across two studies, we found that subjective career success was positively related to authentic pride among employees with higher levels of genuine self‐esteem, whereas it was positively related to hubristic pride among employees with higher levels of grandiose narcissism. Furthermore, when employees exhibited higher genuine self‐esteem, subjective career success was positively related to their career crafting through the mediating role of authentic pride. Conversely, when employees exhibited higher levels of grandiose narcissism, subjective career success was positively related to their workplace incivility through the mediating role of hubristic pride. Our findings underscore both the benefits and drawbacks of subjective career success for employees and organizations.