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

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.