Executive Summary:
Is Your Career Successful?
How successful is your career? What predicts career success? People obviously differ in how they answer the former questions. On the other hand, many studies have converged in concluding that career success is driven by a range of factors such as education, personality, gender, networking, and mentoring relationships. However, in the lead article of a December 2004 Journal of Organizational Behavior special edition on career success, Management and Organization’s Assistant Professor Peter Heslin provides reasons for scholars to rethink their conclusions about what leads to career success.
Heslin’s critique stems from the observation that in contrast to the multitude of studies predicting career success, curiously little scholarly attention has been devoted to exploring and understanding the nature of career success. Heslin commented, “With little understanding of what people consider when they evaluate their career success, how could we be confident in the results of research predicting when people will experience career success?”
Careers research has typically predicted “objective” career success (e.g., pay and promotions), as verifiable by an impartial third party. Over the last couple of decades, studies have increasingly also investigated what leads to “subjective” career success, peoples’ reactions to their careers, as most often indicated by their job satisfaction. Heslin shows how both approaches ignore a range of factors that people potentially consider when evaluating their career success.
Objective Career Success
Zig Ziglar astutely observed that: “Folks who say they don’t care about money will probably lie about other things too!” Nonetheless, receiving high pay and promotions do not necessarily make people feel proud or successful. In fact, they can cause work and personal alienation, as well as depressive reactions. For instance, newly appointed managers who do not delegate adequately can soon become overwhelmed and depressed, potentially leading to both subjective and objective career failure. On the other hand, corporate superstars have reported regretting the high price they paid for their success, in terms of family relationships, health, and other neglected aspects of their lives.
Organizational trends over the last two decades - such as downsizing and outsourcing - have also lessened the scope for, and desirability of hierarchical progression through promotion. This applies even to MBA graduates, those who have earned the degree widely promoted as the credential for access to a “successful” managerial career characterized by mobility up a corporate ladder. For instance, a recent survey of the managerial careers of 116 MBA graduates over a 13-year period revealed that two-thirds of them had not followed this prototypical managerial career path … and had not paid a price in terms of their income, career satisfaction, or job security.
Heslin draws attention to the need for research that considers the objective indicators of career success that are most meaningful within particular career contexts. For instance, both school teachers and academic mentors often frame their career success in terms of hard data regarding the learning and other attainments of their students and protégés. Similarly, bus and taxi drivers conceivably base their career success on their years of driving without an accident, industrial designers on emails of peer recognition for their creativity, and doctors on the proportion of emergency patients’ lives they save. Even when continual attainment of such objective outcomes does not lead to an increase in pay, promotions, occupational status or rank, their value as objective indicators of career success is not necessarily diminished.
Subjective Career Success
There are numerous reasons why job satisfaction does not equate to subjective career success. For instance, a person who thinks they have a highly successful career does not necessarily consider it to be less successful if they begin a job that they find dissatisfying. Second, a person could be highly satisfied with their current job, though dissatisfied with the career attainments which preceded it. Third, a gratifying job with limited prospects for future career opportunities could invoke minimal feelings of career success (e.g., working as a life-guard). Conversely, a person may dislike what they are doing (e.g., being a graduate student) but be happy with the state of their career because of the prospects it brings. Finally, several large scale studies across the US and a range of other countries have concluded that managers and professionals tend to ultimately value things such as work-life balance and contributing to a worthwhile cause, much more than job satisfaction or the objective outcomes of prestige, power, money, and advancement.
Thus, subjective career success often includes reactions to actual and anticipated career-related attainments across a broader time frame than one’s immediate job satisfaction. This can also include a wider range of outcomes, such as the sense of identity, meaning, and work-life balance afforded by one’s career.
Improving Career Success Measurement
Heslin theoretically derives a wide range of avenues for improving the sensitivity of future research to the criteria that study participants use to judge their career success. A brief sample of these ideas follows:
(1) Research on “What employees want”. For example, in a recent study of 4,500 knowledge workers and managers from eight countries, work-life balance was rated as the most important out of the many facets of a career. Most career success studies fail to include even a single item assessing work-life balance. Future research that does so could alter the existing evidence about the antecedents of subjective “career success”.
(2) Work orientation. Pioneering work by Amy Wrzesniewski, of New York University, has shown that most people have one of three distinct orientations to their work: seeing it primarily as a job, a career, or a calling. People with a job orientation focus mainly on the financial rewards they receive for working. People with a career orientation exhibit a deeper personal investment in their work, seeking to maximize their income, social status, power and prestige within their occupation. Finally, people with a calling orientation strive to experience fulfillment as a result of performing their work, often by construing their work as helping to make the world a better place. For example, a hospital cleaner may view their work as the meaningful task of facilitating the comfort and health of all who enter ‘their’ hospital. Not surprisingly, compared to those with a job or a career orientation, those with a calling orientation report the highest job and life satisfaction; they also miss the fewest days of work.
(3) Organizational culture. Career success is likely to be viewed rather differently in prototypical market versus clan organizational cultures. Within a market culture, the relationship between the individual and the organization is contractual. Mutual obligations are explicitly specified. Symbols of status and relative rank are not emphasized. Rather, large bonuses are paid for meeting or exceeding explicit performance targets in this context where independence and individuality are given greater credence than feelings of belonging to a social system. Clan cultures, by contrast, are characterized by a more fraternal and committed relationship between the individual and the organization. In exchange for loyalty, senior managers in clan cultures show a greater concern for individuals’ employment security and career development than is typical of market cultures. For instance, promotion from within is much more common in clan cultures than in market cultures. Compared to market cultures, financial bonuses are a small part of total compensation, while rituals and patterns of interaction that signify and cultivate a sense of belonging and status play an important role in clan cultures. Heslin predicts that market and clan cultures will each foster and satisfy rather different criteria of “career success”.
(4) National culture. Although national cultural differences have a pervasive influence upon how people approach and evaluate their work, they have been largely neglected in the careers literature. In general, compared to those from individualist cultures (e.g., Australia and the US), those from collectivist cultures (e.g., China and India) may base their sense of career success more on group achievements and other people’s expectations, such as the approval of others (e.g., parents, spouses, and friends). Similarly, those from being-oriented cultures (e.g., Argentina and Brazil) could be generally expected to give greater primacy to work relationships, harmony, and balance when evaluating their career success, compared to the concern with conspicuous achievements and material rewards that characterize more doing-oriented cultures (e.g., Chile and Poland). Research along these lines may establish some boundary conditions of the primarily US-centric career success literature. However, using the results of such research constructively will require appreciating that knowledge of an individual’s country of birth and/or cultural values enables nothing more than a tentative generalization about how a particular person will evaluate her or his career success.
(5) Winner-take-all markets. Renowned economists Robert Frank and Philip Cook argue that more and more individuals are being drawn to the pursuit of a limited number of superstar positions in winner-take-all markets. These markets are characterized by huge rewards for exceptional performance, relative to that exhibited by other people, as well as small differences in attainment resulting in massive differences in rewards. For instance, compare the fame and fortune of Olympic Gold medalists with those whose almost identical performance earns them third or fourth place. Intense national and global competition is substantially increasing the stakes of winning, relative to being in second place, within many industries (e.g., entertainment, sports, software development, fashion, book publishing, academe, consulting, law, etc.). Frank and Cook argue that the slim prospect of becoming a wealthy star in one of these emerging winner-take-all markets is decreasing the number and talent of those pursuing careers in other less glamorous, though more socially useful sectors, such as engineering, manufacturing, civil service, child care, and teaching.
Despite these societal costs, many factors attract and retain participants in winner-take-all markets. For instance, aspirants consistently and notoriously over-estimate their chances of winning contests for highly prized occupational roles, such as being a super-model, a CEO, a pro-basketball player, or a star Wall Street banker. Also, people can feel entrapped in winner-take-all markets: they must invest heavily in things they believe will improve their chances of success (e.g., expensive clothes, cosmetic surgery, steroid consumption, continual coaching, etc.). Given such investments, participants in winner-take-all markets are liable to experience career success only with the slight odds that they receive the massive rewards for excelling vis-a-vis virtually all their peers.
(6) Ideological rewards. Tight labor markets for knowledge workers and other scarce human resources have stimulated interest in creative ways to attract, motivate, and retain required talent. Among these options is offering ideological rewards, such as the opportunity to contribute to a worthwhile cause. Three prominent examples are: “To give unlimited opportunity to women” (Mary Kay Cosmetics), “Elevation of the Japanese culture and national status” (Sony), and “To preserve and improve human life” (Merck). Organizations that strive to benefit constituencies such as the environment, the poor, families, etc. – potentially build and sustain devotion by nurturing members’ subjective criteria of career success of having “made a difference”. On the other hand, explicitly offering ideological rewards may backfire when organizations are perceived to have violated their ideological commitments. Heslin identifies several related areas for future research to address, such as “Under what circumstances do people respond by altering their personal career success criteria versus their organizational commitment/membership?”
Conclusion
Career success clearly involves much more than pay, promotions, and the job satisfaction that an individual experiences. Both individual preferences and the context in which a person works clearly affect how they evaluate their career success. Career decisions inevitably entail compromises. Your experience of career success may be fostered by conscious, explicit, and frank reflection upon all that career success means to you, combined with a realistic assessment of how different career options are likely to satisfy (and fail to satisfy) the different facets of your full array of career aspirations. For careers researchers, advances in the conceptualization and measurement of career success may enhance the validity and usefulness of future theory and research aimed at understanding, predicting, and facilitating the experience of “career success.” |
