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Laura Heijnen – Organisational Psychology: Performance at WorkProblem 7. Straight to the top
What factors influence career development?
ü Arnold (2005) – Careers and career management
ü Greenberg (2011) – Understanding and managing your career
Nature of careers
- Basic definitions:
o Career: evolving sequence of work experiences over time à interchangeably
used with job + occupation.
o Job: predetermined set of activities one is expected to perform.
o Occupation: coherent set of jobs.
o Some careers more lucrative/profitable than others. How much money
depends greatly of choice of career.
o Careers are also important because give sense of accomplishment + pride, and
give meaning to lives (e.g., doctors saving lives) à define ourselves by work.
- Types of careers: general patterns.
o Steady-sate careers: lifetime of employment in single occupation; usually very
satisfied + becoming highly skilled experts (e.g., bakery).
o Linear careers: staying in certain field + working way up to occupational ladder,
from low-level to high-level jobs (e.g., corporate ladder).
o Spiral careers: people evolve through series of occupations, each of which
requires new skills + builds upon existing knowledge + skills/previous job (e.g.,
scientist, teacher, author). Constantly growing + improving in same profession.
o Transitory careers: someone moves between different unrelated positions,
spending +/- 4 years in each. Not able to derive satisfaction from 1 job, or not
major source of fulfilment in life.
1
, Laura Heijnen – Organisational Psychology: Performance at Work
- Other types from Kanter: bureaucratic becoming less.
o Bureaucratic career: narrow sense of predictable moves to jobs of increasing
status, usually within single occupation/organisation (= linear career?).
o Professional career: growth occurs through development of competence to
take on complex tasks rather than through promotion to another job à
person’s status depends more on his/her reputation with other
professionals/clients than on level in organisation hierarchy.
o Entrepreneurial career: rests on the capacity to spot opportunities to create
valued outputs + build up one’s own organisation/operation.
The boundaryless career
- Range of career forms that defy traditional employment assumptions à either by
choice or necessity, people move across boundaries between organisations,
departments, hierarchical levels, functions + sets of skills. Movement is made easier
because boundaries tending to dissolve.
- Movement necessary for employees to maintain employability + for organisations to
maintain effectiveness.
- Similar to professional career: person’s marketability + affirmation are derived from
outside present employer + sustained through outside networks.
- Another boundary that’s being broken down is between work + non-work: people are
increasingly likely to consider impact of job on home life before taking it + more work
done at home.
- Product of individualistic western culture.
- Requires communion (relating closely to others, recognising interdependence) +
agency (individual action on environment).
Career success
- Measuring by seeing how high in status hierarchy person has risen and/or how much
earnings have grown = objectively verifiable indicators. BUT: earnings + promotions
usually in traditional/bureaucratic career, but less in other forms à also subjective
indicators like attitudes + feelings.
- Other measures are on people’s feelings of career/job satisfactions, but not perfect
(because relate to earnings/only to job).
- Structures such as personal influence, being recognised for achievements + sense of
accomplishment/achievement, enjoyment, working with integrity + achieving balance
between work and non-work found as criteria for career success.
- Model: range of factors influencing objective + subjective career success person
experiences. 3 types:
o Structural/social: impersonal factors like nature of labour market, but also
personal ones like biases + prejudices held by people who select others for job.
o Features of individual: human capital, partly reflecting what person brings to
work through inherited + acquired characteristics. Significance + meaning
depend on how they’re interpreted by others + how they influence individual’s
behaviour.
o Person’s behaviour: how much networking with other people + how much
effort exerting in work.
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, Laura Heijnen – Organisational Psychology: Performance at Work
- Objectively measured = easier to understand + measured.
- Career tournaments: failing = difficult to catch up later, even when having high ability
à structural/social factors can sometimes override human capital.
- Wide range of factors influencing success: married + male + consumer durables
industry + non-employed spouses + degree from top-rated American university +
desire to progress further up hierarchy + working extra hours = highest salary.
- Career satisfaction correlated with salary: subjective + objective careers are
connected.
- Whites less satisfied than people from ethnic backgrounds + ambitious people also
less satisfied than unambitious ones à ambition = probably not yet risen as far as
wanted to.
- Proactive personality (= taking initiative in improving current circumstances or
creating new ones) predicts salary progression, rate of promotion + career
satisfaction.
- Role of social networks:
o Structural holes: extent to which individual’s contacts didn’t know each other
(i.e., holes in network)
o Number of weak ties: extent to which person has many contacts they know
slightly, rather than few knowing well.
o Social network theory: most effective networks have both of these properties
because allow person to access many different perspectives without getting
attached to any of them. Predict number of contacts.
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