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The old picture of stable employment and organizational careers associated with it, has faded, and a new picture of dynamic employment and boundaryless careers calls for attention. The boundaryless career refers to the notion that today's employees manage their own career paths, as they seize new and often different job opportunities to obtain training, enhance their knowledge and remain marketable.
Arthur and Rousseau (1996), in developing the concept, propose that the principal features of such careers are: job mobility across multiple employers, personal responsibility for directing one's own career development, and the development of social networks to shape and sustain that career. On the positive side, this career autonomy can enable individuals to pursue career paths in which they can attain personally defined subjective career success and achieve a higher level of work-non work balance in their lives giving them flexible time, space, and capability to manage their multiple roles. But on the negative side, the resultant career insecurity and uncertainty may decrease individuals' chances to derive full benefit from the flexibility and freedom of their boundaryless careers, therefore, it can pose a threat to individuals who desire to achieve a sense of work-life balance and might affect their sense of career success, in turn, their well-being. Thusly, boundaryless career should not retain all the positive connotations it has acquired during the past decade, its utility has actually decreased over time as the number of attributes associated with it has increased.
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