Abstract/Summary

Previous research on the psychological effect of job change has revealed a honeymoon-hangover pattern during the turnover process. However, there is a dearth of evidence on how individuals react and adapt to multiple job changes over their working lives. This study distinguished adaptation to a single job change in the short term from adaptation to the process of job change in the long term. Drawing on two large-scale, long-running panel datasets from Britain and Australia, it examined how job satisfaction trajectory evolved as individuals made a series of consecutive job changes since they first entered the labour market. Our fixed effect analyses showed that in both countries, individuals experienced a stronger honeymoon effect with each successive job change, before gradually reverting to their baseline job satisfaction. In short, the amplitude of the honeymoon-hangover effect increased across multiple job changes. By distinguishing ‘adaptation to change’ from ‘change in adaption’, this study generated original insights into the role of job mobility in facilitating career development and extended set point theory from understanding the impact of single life events to recurring life events.