خودمدیریتی حرفه ای : ماهیت، علل و عواقب آن

In a recent special issue [Journal of Vocational Behavior 59 (2001) 284], scholars noted that the field of vocational psychology needs a better understanding of career self-management. This article proposes a conceptual framework of career self-management, based on Crites’ [Vocational Psychology, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1969] model of vocational adjustment. It argues that people use three types of career self-managing behavior (positioning, influence, and boundary management) as adaptive responses to career development tasks. These behaviors are used to respond to or eliminate thwarting conditions or career barriers, and thereby lead to vocational adjustment. Suggested determinants of this behavior are self-efficacy, desire for control, and career anchors. Career self-management can enhance perceptions of control over the career, leading to career satisfaction, but it may also be associated with negative outcomes and maladjustment. The framework is suggested to apply both to bounded ‘organizational’ careers and to more flexible, improvised careers. The article concludes by considering the implications for research and practice.

These are challenging times for workers. Many commentators have argued that, in an increasingly chaotic organizational environment, workers will experience a great range and frequency of transitions during their working lives, and will need to take responsibility for charting and navigating their careers. These challenges also impact the field of vocational psychology, since globalization, technological advances and postindustrial society are suggested to be changing the very nature of the occupations and career guidance with which the field is concerned. In a recent volume of this journal (Savickas, 2001), scholars acknowledged that the field needs to take account of new types of jobs evolving from informal communications, flattened organizational hierarchies, virtual teams, and teleworking. It also needs to be able to explain how employees manage their careers strategically, how they can be adaptive and flexible throughout the career, and how they can most effectively negotiate the boundaries between work and nonwork. The field could also benefit from a greater degree of integration with other fields such as industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology. Accordingly, this article seeks to illuminate a behavioral phenomenon that is of key importance to vocational psychology: career self-management. This is a concept that has a considerable heritage in academic writing, depicted for example in early research exploring how managers and executives progressed in large corporations (Kanter, 1977; Whyte, 1956) and more recently in I/O psychology literature on the determinants of managerial success (e.g., Judge & Bretz, 1994; Seibert, Kraimer, & Liden, 2001; Tharenou, 1997; Wayne, Liden, Graf, & Ferris, 1997). The idea of individual responsibility for career has attracted renewed attention in recent popular writing, and also in academic work exploring the effects of organizational change on careers (e.g., Sullivan, Carden, & Martin, 1998). In some recent prescriptive accounts, considerable attention is given to the ways in which individuals can and should manage their careers (Inkson, 2000; King, 2001). Curiously, while scholars have acknowledged the importance of career self-management for vocational psychology, there have been few attempts to underpin the concept with substantive theory, or to conduct rigorous empirical investigations of it. Career self-management deserves a more scholarly consideration in vocational psychology for a number of reasons. First, most people want to believe that their careers are their own property, and efforts to shape the direction of their careers provide them with a means to assert agency in their life course (Tiedeman & Miller-Tiedman, 1984). This is increasingly relevant given the changing nature of work: if the nature of organizational life is becoming unpredictable or even chaotic, as some commentators argue, then career self-management may be the only way to navigate through a turbulent world. Being able to understand the more complex nature of occupations and help clients manage their way through this supposed career ‘pandemonium’ (cf. Brousseau, Driver, Eneroth, & Larsson, 1996) is essential if vocational psychology is to retain a contemporary focus. Second, career self-management is a kind of vocational behavior that people engage in throughout the course of their working lives, not just at the outset. The study of career self-managing behavior can therefore extend the reach of vocational psychology beyond its current focus on stable characteristics of individuals, opportunities and employment relationships to a more dynamic, time-dependent understanding of the career course. For many people, careers have a personal as well as a vocational meaning; the study of career self-management can help to understand not only how people achieve satisfaction at work, but also how they fit work in to the rest of their lives (Richardson, 1996). Third, the study of career self-management can provide insights into all sorts of career patterns and trajectories. While self-managing behavior has been widely depicted in accounts of ‘traditional’ careers (e.g., Jennings, 1971), it is also pertinent to those who have long experienced career patterns similar to what are now termed ‘boundaryless’ or ‘new’ careers, such as contingent laborers or the self-employed. Such people may not have access to organizational career management initiatives for much of their working lives, and are obliged to seek out opportunities, update their skills and market themselves in ways that are now suggested to be important in a changing organizational world. Studying career self-management in such occupational groups should help to illuminate contemporary notions that lack a theoretical underpinning in vocational psychology, such as ‘employability’ and ‘portfolio careers.’ This article argues that Crites, 1969 and Crites, 1976 model of vocational adjustment provides an excellent starting point for understanding career self-management, but that this model could usefully be revised and updated to offer a more contemporary perspective. The article combines Crites’ analysis with insights from I/O psychology in order to develop a more complete conceptual model of career self-management. The structure of the article is as follows. The first section revisits Crites’ model, considering its relevance to contemporary careers and arguing that it can be viewed as an early model of career self-management. The second section identifies issues relating to the conceptualization of career self-management that are not addressed adequately either by Crites’ model or by other literature on career self-management. The third section takes Crites’ model as its starting point, and draws on some of the I/O psychology literature to describe the nature of career self-managing behavior, and the fourth section discusses the causes and consequences of that behavior. Finally the discussion section returns to the issues identified in the second section, and considers the implications for future research and practice.

As Lent (2001) observed, vocational psychology has been limited in the range of career development phenomena and variables that it has embraced. Reams of journal pages have been devoted to issues of initial career choice and entry, but there has been far less effort to understand career adjustment. This article offers insights into a different kind of vocational behavior: the behavior that people use within a chosen occupation to remain economically productive, to keep pace with developments in technology and opportunity, to maintain contacts and acquaintances, to move between employers and to fit work in with the rest of their lives. It is these kinds of challenges that people face when they are confronting the ‘thwarting conditions’ described by Crites nearly fifty years ago. This article has attempted to offer a deeper insight into the ways in which people achieve a sense of self-determination and mastery over the tasks that confront them. It began from a position of strength in vocational psychology by adopting Crites’ model of vocational adjustment, and sought to extend that model by drawing upon a range of theoretical perspectives from outside vocational psychology. This article argued that engaging in career self-management can deliver positive psychological outcomes, including career and life satisfaction, enhanced self-efficacy and well-being, if desired career outcomes are achieved. Career self-management may therefore be greatly beneficial for self-motivated high skilled workers seeking to adapt to a changing world of work. However, for less advantaged workers who struggle to mobilize the personal resources necessary to engage in it effectively, career self-management may be undermining. This should be acknowledged in popular debates about the changing nature of work, which have hitherto tended to portray career self-management in highly optimistic terms, as a source of personal empowerment and liberation. There are many ways in which the framework could be developed and refined, and there is still considerable need for empirical research on career self-management, particularly beyond managerial and professional populations. It is hoped that this article will stimulate an academic debate on the subject. The vigorous researching of career self-management has become a pressing need, if we are to understand better our own lives and the lives of those whom we research.