SELF-MOTIVATED CAREER PLANNING

Self-Motivated Career Planning

Self-Motivated Career Planning

Introduction

Career-enhancing strategies refer to voluntary or extra-role behaviors that are not part of the formal job description specified by the employer (see Feij et al., 1995; Noe, 1996). Many career theorists and practitioners concur that the use of career-enhancing strategies, such as building a network of contacts and developing work-related expertise and skills, are beneficial to effective career management and may engender positive career outcomes (Aryee et al., 1996; Gould and Penley, 1984; Greenhaus and Callanan, 1994; Noe, 1996). Despite this scholarly attention and the apparent importance of career-enhancing strategies for individual and organizational career management, our knowledge of career-enhancing strategy prediction is limited. A review of the literature suggests that two conceptually distinct sets of predictors are important: organizational experiences (e.g. organizational career prospects) and motivational attributes (e.g. advancement motivation).

Self-Motivated Career Planning

Past empirical work has largely ignored the prediction of career-enhancing strategies with a general tendency to focus on the prediction of career success measures such as salary and promotions instead. While this has been insightful, recent researchers highlight that career strategy implementation reflects an important indicator of effective career management in its own right (Greenhaus and Callanan, 1994, pp. 28-9). Other researchers, such as Vardi (1980), have also conceptualized strategic career behavior as career-related criteria or more specifically “mobility behaviors” (pp. 348-51). Similarly, Feij et al. (1995) suggested that career-enhancing strategies can be seen as behavioral career management practices on the part of the individual that not only facilitate skill development and experience essential to career development, but also contribute to organizational effectiveness. In addition to this, models on career-enhancing strategies posit that motivational and organizational factors may operate as precursors to the use of career-enhancing strategies. This paper will first summarize the theoretical background, then review past research on career-enhancing strategy prediction, and finally propose the study hypotheses.

Larry Cochran states that Career management can be viewed as the overall process by which employees develop an awareness about individual strengths and organizational opportunities, set realistic career goals, and implement career strategies that facilitate the achievement of their career goals (Greenhaus and Callanan, 1994). Available models and frameworks support the notion that motivation and organizational factors underpin career strategy implementation. Greenhaus and Callanan (1994) acknowledged that the use of career-enhancing strategies can be characterized as an indicator of effective career management and moreover that these indicators may be influenced by the organizational environment and essentially the motivation of the employee to achieve their advancement goals.

Larry Cochran proposed that situation-centered organizational and person-centered motivational factors directly or indirectly facilitate the proactive use of career-enhancing strategies. These strategies, in turn, positively influence career advancement via increased work performance and positive peer evaluation. Moreover, of relevance here, Gould and Penley posited that career strategy behavior is directly influenced by organizational opportunities (and hence individuals' experiences of them), and also proposed that a person's motivation for career progression is related to career-strategy usage via enhanced performance. Although Gould and Penley's postulations are quite general, they nevertheless advocate an ...