An integrative model of career adaptability, innovative behavior, and work skills on public sector performance: The mediating role of career development in local government

Purpose: As digital disruption and bureaucratic reform continue to reshape the public sector, strategic transformation is required to enhance service effectiveness. This study investigates how institutional career development systems channel part of individuals' capabilities into sustained performance, while another part remains unconverted. The study further develops and tests a human resource development model linking career adaptability, innovative work behaviour, and work skills with employee performance, with career development serving as a mediating mechanism.Design/methodology/approach: Survey data from 372 civil servants across 34 Regional Government Organisations (Organisasi Perangkat Daerah, OPD) in Lahat Regency, South Sumatra, Indonesia, were analysed with variance-based structural equation modelling in SmartPLS 4.0, using 5,000 bootstrap subsamples.Findings: The results indicate that career adaptability (β = 0.131; p = 0.036), innovative work behaviour (β = 0.175; p = 0.047), and work skills (β = 0.131; p = 0.023) each exert a significant positive effect on employee performance. Career development mediates the relationships between career adaptability and work skills with performance, whereas the mediating pathway for innovative work behaviour did not reach conventional significance (β = 0.146; p = 0.056), even though innovative work behaviour produced the strongest path towards career development (β = 0.503; p < 0.001).Research limitations/implications: Theoretically, the contribution of this study lies not in the combination of constructs, but in advancing the concept of capability codification the extent to which an individual capability is formally categorised within promotion criteria as a boundary condition that may explain the observed inconsistency in mediation.Practical implications: Practically, this study offers evidence-based input for public administration to strengthen merit-based promotion systems and align competency-based career pathways with the digital reform agenda.Originality/value: This study contributes to the strategic HRD literature by proposing capability codification the degree to which a capability is formally embedded within promotion criteria as a boundary condition on career development's mediating role, challenging the assumption that this mechanism operates uniformly across capability types. It further distinguishes perceived from enacted career development, identifying a perceptual–structural gap that connects strategic HRD to institutional theory's account of decoupling between formal commitment and operative practice. By integrating Career Construction Theory, Human Capital Theory, and competency-based HRD around capabilities that differ systematically in institutional legibility, the study offers a diagnostic test of conditional, rather than universal, mediation grounded in an ex-ante reading of Indonesia's civil service regulatory architecture.