ADULT DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY

Adult Developmental Theory



Adult Developmental Theory

My autobiography linked with the adult developmental theory. Married professional women are increasingly making career decisions that create sensational headlines in management. Most recently, popular press and media hype has focused on talented, well-educated professional women who choose to stop working in order to stay home and care for their families (Waterman, 2001). This notion of married professional women leaving the workforce has been expounded by the media with catch-phrases including the “opt-out revolution” and the “brain drain.”

Despite ongoing conversations, an underlying controversy remains over whether or not “opting out” is a legitimate phenomenon marking professional women's careers. Scholars engaged in this dialogue disagree as to whether or not opting out is an overblown myth or a realistic fact of the twenty-first century career landscape. At the core of this debate lies a fundamental question - what drives married professional women's career exit?

A variety of frameworks have been presented to explain women's career behavior, especially with regards to the highly charged notion of opting out. These frameworks have originated from a careers-based perspective. For example, research has identified “push and pull factors” such as work-family demands, lack of advancement opportunities, and unfavorable working conditions (e.g. unsupportive boss, stress, and burnout) that cause women to opt out or leave the workforce (Arnett, 2000). Alternatively, shifting career needs through different life stages, utilitarian costs and benefits, and involuntary career departures due to economic downturns have been identified as a basis for career decisions. Despite these explanations, what remains conspicuously absent from the literature is an examination of the interplay that a woman's sense of self and relationships with others have on her career behaviors, especially her decision to exit the workforce (Montgomery, 2003).

Our goal and contribution is to present a theoretical model delineating how a woman's identity coupled with influence stemming from her social network act in concert to shape career behaviors, specifically her decision to exit the workforce. We focus our theorizing on married professional women, for whom the decision to work and in what capacity is a choice (i.e. women for whom a variety of work or non-work arrangements is economically viable), since it is the career choices of these women that have motivated the enduring debate over “opting-out.” Examining the convergence of identity and social networks and the reciprocal relationship these constructs have on career phenomena is an agenda which has been increasingly called for within the organizational literature. Our research also contributes directly to the highly charged conversations surrounding women, work, and family; conversations held in both scholarly and practitioner circles that are gaining momentum as we march forward into the twenty-first century career landscape (Erikson, 2003).

We define career exit as complete departure from the paid workforce. Career exit or opting out, as it is often referred to in the popular press, can be permanent, whereby a woman sees herself transitioning to “household manager” and expects that this will be the career she enacts for the remainder of her lifetime, or temporary, ...