Your Career Is a Flywheel, Here's the Research Behind It
Most people think about career advancement in a straight line: work hard → get noticed → get promoted. That story is simple, but incomplete. A 2024 study in the International Journal of Psychology followed 976 white-collar employees at one of Italy’s largest companies over six years, using three waves of data from three different kinds of measures. What it found is a strong, longitudinal pattern for how career development can actually work inside organizations like this one.
The Flywheel Nobody Talks About
The researchers, Guido Alessandri, Laura Borgogni, and Gary Latham, tested a model grounded in Bandura’s social cognitive theory. The central idea: self-efficacy (your belief that “I can cause, I can bring about, I can make happen”), job performance, and career success don’t just move in one direction; they reinforce one another over time. In their longitudinal model, these three variables form a loop: self-efficacy → better performance → promotion → even higher self-efficacy → even better performance.
In their analysis, job performance statistically accounted for the link between self-efficacy and later career advancement, consistent with the idea that believing you can perform helps mainly by improving what you actually do, and that improved performance is what organizations tend to reward.
The reverse path also held: earlier career success predicted later improvements in job performance, which in turn predicted increases in self-efficacy, suggesting that the flywheel can spin in both directions over multi-year timescales.
The effects the researchers observed are statistically robust but modest in size, which is exactly what you would expect for complex, real-world careers unfolding over six years.
Why This Matters for Leaders
If you manage people, this model gives you a practical insight most leadership training overlooks. The first meaningful win matters disproportionately, not just because of the outcome itself, but because of what it begins to set in motion. An early promotion or recognition event is more than a reward; it can kick-start a cycle of higher performance and stronger confidence that keeps building over time.
Findings like these help explain why talent can stagnate when organizations are slow or inconsistent in recognizing performance. They are not only delaying promotions; they may be preventing the flywheel from ever gathering momentum in the first place.
The Uncomfortable Finding
One uncomfortable finding comes from both this study and the broader research it cites: the raw correlation between supervisor-rated job performance and promotions is weaker than you might expect. Prior studies have reported correlations as low as .10, and one study even found a near-zero correlation of −.04 between promotion and supervisor performance ratings. Performance does matter, the longitudinal data confirm that higher performance predicts later advances in hierarchical level, but the signal is noisy, and organizations are far from perfect at recognizing it.
That has real implications at the individual level. If you are performing at a high level and not advancing, the issue may not be your output alone, but how clearly that performance is captured and recognized inside your organization. It’s a prompt to think about how you document your work, how often you communicate impact, and whether key decision-makers actually see what you’re contributing.
For leaders, it’s a warning that your recognition and promotion systems may be leaking high performers without you realizing it.
The Gender Dimension
The study also surfaced a small but consistent gender pattern. Across all three waves, women reported slightly lower work self-efficacy and tended to occupy lower hierarchical levels than men, even after controlling for age, tenure, and education. The effect sizes were not large, but they were stable enough to matter, especially given how central self-efficacy and early advancement are to getting the flywheel spinning.
If the flywheel starts more slowly for some groups, waiting for “performance to speak for itself” is unlikely to close the gap. Instead, Bandura’s work points to three particularly powerful levers for building self-efficacy: mastery experiences (real opportunities to succeed at meaningful tasks), modelling (seeing similar others succeed), and credible encouragement. Organizations can deliberately design development programs, stretch roles, and feedback practices to support all three.
What You Can Do With This
Whether you lead a team or you are building your own career, the framework is the same: diagnose which side of the triangle is weakest right now. Is the bottleneck your belief (self-efficacy), your execution (performance), or the organization’s recognition system (how visible and valued your contributions are)? Each one calls for a different kind of intervention.
Build self-efficacy through mastery, not slogans. The most durable confidence comes from actually developing and demonstrating competence, taking on challenging but achievable tasks, getting high-quality feedback, and seeing your skills translate into real results.
Create early wins, both for yourself and for the people you lead. The study’s six-year data show that these accumulative effects are observable over long time frames: today’s performance and advancement can set up tomorrow’s gains in confidence and contribution.
And if you are performing well but not advancing, do not just work harder in the dark. Make the work visible: document outcomes, connect them to business priorities, and ensure the right people see them. The research suggests that the link between performance and promotion is not automatic; it depends on how clearly the organization can perceive and use performance information.
Your career is not just a ladder; it behaves more like a flywheel. The first pushes, on belief, performance, and recognition, may feel small, but over time they can compound into a powerful, self-reinforcing motion.
Bandura’s social cognitive theory is built on a simple but powerful premise: human behavior doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It emerges from the continuous, reciprocal interaction of three forces, the person (their beliefs, expectations, and self-perceptions), their behavior (what they actually do), and their environment (the external consequences and opportunities that follow). In a career context, this maps cleanly onto self-efficacy (the belief that “I can cause, I can bring about, I can make happen”), job performance (the actual execution), and career success (promotions, recognition, hierarchical advancement). The key word is reciprocal, these three don’t flow in one direction. Self-efficacy shapes performance, performance shapes the environment’s response, and that response feeds back into self-efficacy. It’s not a straight line from belief to outcome; it’s a loop that, once set in motion, can compound over time in either direction.