نظریه مقررات اقدام و خودمدیریت حرفه ای

Much of the responsibility for managing careers is shifting from employers to adaptive and proactive employees. A career management intervention based on action regulation theory trained 205 white collar employees to engage actively in their own career building by increasing their self-knowledge, career goal commitment, and career plan quality. As hypothesized, these three variables were positively related to subsequent career self-management behaviors, which led both directly and indirectly to career satisfaction almost 10 months after the intervention. Self-management career interventions based within an employing organization appear feasible.

With the changing nature of jobs (Bridges, 1995) and the concept of the protean career (Hall, 1996 and Hall, 2004), there has been a shift of the responsibility for careers from employers to employees (Arnold, 2001) and a call for people to be proactive regarding their careers (Seibert, Crant, & Kraimer, 1999), which requires a high degree of personal initiative (Frese & Fay, 2001). In this paper we present a model explaining how employees can self-manage their careers within a single organization and how the organization can aid their self-management. We test the model with a quasi-experimental design using an intervention based on the concept of personal initiative (Frese & Fay, 2001). An action theory framework based on personal initiative served as a basis for developing the intervention content and process (self-regulation). The goal of this study is to expand knowledge on the relation of individuals’ control of their careers by addressing the following two issues. First, an action-theory based model attempts to explain how employees enhance control over their own careers by engaging in different activities that increase career self-management. Second, the role and importance of active career self-management for career building are clarified. In action regulation theory, control means that individuals steer their own activities in correspondence with some goal (Frese & Zapf, 1994). Self-regulation theory argues that people’s transactions with the environment “enable an individual to guide his/her goal-directed activities over time and across changing circumstances” (Karoly, 1993; see also Vohs & Baumeister, 2004). Interventions to apply self-regulation theory aim at enhanced control and self-regulation, and they have been effective for very specific, short-term employee behaviors such as job attendance (Frayne and Latham, 1987 and Latham and Frayne, 1989), reduction of problematic workplace behaviors (Godat & Brigham, 1999), and sales (Frayne & Geringer, 2000). Evidence about interventions to attain more complex, longer-term goals (e.g., career building) is lacking. Self-regulation theory is based on the idea that goals, plans and feedback are relevant parameters for regulating one’s actions (Carver and Scheier, 1982, Frese and Sabini, 1985 and Hacker, 1985). An action sequence (Frese & Zapf, 1994) consists of the following steps: Goals, information collection, planning, execution, and feedback. People monitor their environments, gathering information to aid in planning a course of action. As a result of goals and information, they develop plans. Executing the plan means to actively influence the environment on one’s behalf, and the results are feedback regarding one’s actions. Thus, personal initiative, characterized by people being self-starting, proactive and persistent in the face of barriers (Frese, Kring, Soose, & Zempel, 1996), serves as the underlying foundation for this study’s intervention. We begin by developing two models to apply action theory to career self-management. The first model (Fig. 1a) explains how a career-focused intervention based on action regulation theory increases career self-management through self-knowledge and goal commitment, which affect plan quality. The second model (Fig. 1b) explains how implementation of active career self-management behaviors affects career satisfaction, directly or through feedback variables from the organizational environment. The term feedback in action theory refers to stimuli that the person can interpret as information about the action. This can be either information on the process of action within the acting person (e.g., proprioceptive feedback), given by other people (e.g., in the sense of receiving a smile, when one has told a joke), by the objective environment (e.g., receiving a pay raise), or by a feedback intervention (when other people give me information on my actions so that I can learn from it). The models are tested in a longitudinal field quasi-experiment over a period of more than 9 months. Full-size image (50 K) Fig. 1. Path analyses of (a) intervention to develop active career self-management behaviors and of (b) consequences of active career self-management behaviors. (a) In this model, goal commitment, self-knowledge, and plan quality were measured directly after the intervention (t2). Active career self-management behaviors were measured 3 months after the intervention (t3). The link from the intervention to active career self-management behaviors was not in the hypothesized model. It was included here to show, (with its nonsignificance) that there was no evidence for partial mediation rather than full mediation. (b) In this model, active career self-management behaviors, organizational responsiveness and career plan implementation were measured 3 months after the intervention (t3). Pay increase and speed in job transition were measured 9 months after the intervention (t4). Career satisfaction change was residualized, controlling for career satisfaction at t1. ∗∗p < .01; ∗∗∗p < .001; ns, not significant. Figure options The study was conducted at a global technology organization headquartered in Germany that spans different industries. Its strong company culture relies on performance management and employee development. It was a good place to conduct the study, because it was typical of many of today’s companies in introducing career-related changes by helping the employees to develop career-related skills. Collecting the data in Germany, however, had some implications for data ownership during the course of the intervention (e.g., in the 360-degree feedback) that needed to adhere to German labor and co-determination laws.

First, consistent with the model predicting career self-management (Fig. 1a), correlations in Table 1 show that self-knowledge measured at two time periods was related to plan quality at time 2, goal commitment at time 2 was related to time 2 plan quality, and plan quality at both time periods was related to active career self-management at time 3. The path analysis for the antecedents model in Fig. 1a was generally supportive predicting active career self-management (χ2 = 3.54, df = 2, p = .17, root mean square residual [RMR] = .01; root mean square error of approximation [RMSEA] = .07; normed fit index [NFI] = 0.99; relative fit index [RFI] = 0.93; comparative fit index [CFI] = 0.99). The intervention was related to significant gains in self-knowledge, plan quality, and goal commitment, which supports Hypothesis 1, demonstrating the intervention was reasonably successful in affecting these mediating variables in the model. The effects described in Fig. 1a translate into d’s of 0.69 for goal commitment, 0.88 for self-knowledge, 1.54 for plan quality and 0.76 for active career self-management behaviors, respectively. Knowledge and goal commitment, in turn, were also significantly related to the gain in plan quality, which supports Hypothesis 2. Plan quality was the only mediator with a significant direct path to active career self-management behaviors, supporting the model in which the effects of the other two mediators occur through plan quality. Thus, Hypothesis 3 was fully supported.