<![CDATA[This study examines the effect of perceived organizational support on career satisfaction among secretariat employees of the Provincial and Regency/City General Election Commissions (KPU) of West Sumatra, and tests psychological empowerment and work engagement as sequential (serial) mediators rather than as two independent, parallel pathways. This article re-estimates a broader parallel-mediation model by adding a path from psychological empowerment to work engagement, allowing a direct test of whether empowerment operates, in part, as a precursor to engagement. Data were collected from 189 civil servants through a Likert-scale questionnaire and analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling–Partial Least Square (SEM-PLS) with a bootstrapping procedure of 500 resamples. The results show that perceived organizational support has a positive and significant effect on career satisfaction (β = 0.446; t = 5.876; p < 0.001), on psychological empowerment (β = 0.681; t = 13.180; p < 0.001), and on work engagement (β = 0.579; t = 9.808; p < 0.001). Psychological empowerment significantly predicts both work engagement (β = 0.334; t = 5.718; p < 0.001) and career satisfaction (β = 0.341; t = 4.211; p < 0.001), whereas work engagement does not significantly predict career satisfaction (β = 0.113; t = 1.358; p = 0.175). Psychological empowerment mediates the effect of perceived organizational support on career satisfaction (specific indirect effect β = 0.232; t = 3.533; p < 0.001), constituting complementary (partial) mediation, whereas work engagement does not mediate this relationship (β = 0.065; t = 1.336; p = 0.182). Work engagement likewise does not mediate the effect of psychological empowerment on career satisfaction (β = 0.038; t = 1.315; p = 0.189), and the full serial pathway from organizational support through both mediators is likewise not significant (β = 0.026; t = 1.324; p = 0.186). These findings indicate that organizational support translates into career satisfaction primarily through employees’ psychological empowerment, while work engagement, although strongly fostered by both organizational support and empowerment, does not by itself translate into greater career satisfaction in this setting.]]>
