Organisation Advocacy While Experiencing a Career Plateau: The Mediating Moderating Role of Emotional Exhaustion and Organisation Embeddedness

Board members often focus on improving the company’s net promoter score. An excellent net promoter score reflects customers’ and employees’ engagement with the company and their readiness to engage in organisational advocacy. Companies often measure organisation advocacy to measure the extent of employee engagement. This research evaluates factors that could influence organisation advocacy. It studies the negative impact of career plateau and emotional exhaustion on organisation advocacy. It further evaluates the positive moderating impact of organisation embeddedness on organisation advocacy. The social identity theory lens evaluates the model and posits that organisation advocacy could be compromised if the employee’s identity gets threatened. The research findings support a significant negative impact of emotional exhaustion on organisation advocacy. Further results prove a significant positive impact of career plateau on emotional exhaustion and a negative impact on Organisation advocacy, mediated through emotional exhaustion. Organisation embeddedness is further seen to positively moderate the combined mediated negative impact of career plateau and emotional exhaustion on organisation advocacy. Employees who are embedded in the organisation try to maintain their social identity and avoid speaking negatively about their organisation. For management, this paper brings forth the point that the supervisor occupying their position for a long time may often be the reason for the subordinate not getting a promotion and experiencing a career plateau. Strategies to maintain subordinate social identity, reduce career plateau, reduce emotional exhaustion and improve organisation embeddedness are further deliberated.