Imagine you are at the head of an IT (Information Technology) consulting company and you experience difficulty to recruit your workers. Despite the advantages you offer, graduate students choose other types of companies like startup ones to integrate professionally. And the few students who postulate in your company resign after a few years to go to work elsewhere. You don’t understand because you offer them a good income, advancement possibilities or flexible work organization for example. As a consequence, you hire a social psychologist to investigate the phenomenon and you learn that you misunderstand what are these students’ career anchors.
Studying what the career motivations are is important because our society is changing. New ways of working are developing such as teleworking, horizontal staff mobility, self-entrepreneurship or flexibility. In addition, managers want to better understand what drives the new generation of workers they’re hiring. For all of these reasons, career anchors are a hot topic.
Defined as a combination of perceived professional competences, values and needs relating to professional work choices (Schein, 1978 ; Bastid and Bravo, 2006), this concept explains us that workers have success criteria for their career which influence them to choose a professional context in compliance with their anchors.
Schein (1990) identifies eight anchors: technical competence, managerial competence, autonomy/independence, security/stability, entrepreneurial creativity, service, challenge and lifestyle. According to him, people can only have one anchor. If a worker has too many anchors, then he doesn’t have worked enough to know what his career priorities are (Schein, 1990). Nevertheless, Martineau, Wils and Tremblay (2001) explain that people can develop a secondary anchor during their career, in addition to their primary one. From these authors point of view, the two anchors can be either complementary or contradictory.
Various studies has explained us that career anchors are linked to changes in society which influence criteria of success, as well as these anchors are linked to job satisfaction and turnover. Indeed, Bastid and Bravo’s study (2006) have showed that these changes in society can impact anchor’s value. For example, autonomy is now more valued than stability. Additionaly, massive changes in society have introduced the concept of prothean career (Hall, 1996) and the concept of nomad career (Arthur and Rousseau, 1996) as well as they have changed the anchors’ criteria of success (Bastid and Bravo, 2006). For example, criteria of success concerning the lifestyle anchor was an organizational flexibility. Nonetheless, today, criteria of success concerning this anchor is a good work-home balance.
Bastid and Bravo (2006) also explains that a gap between career anchors and professional context can induce a negative impact on the employees. According to them, if the difference between career anchors and professional context is too high, it may even push employees to make the decision to resign.
To put in a nutshell, we could say that career anchors are an important concept to study because it explains us what employees need and what drives their job search. As society is undergoing massive changes, Anchors’ criteria of success are subject to change. Also linked to job satisfaction and will to resign, their matching with professional context appears to be important. To conclude, if as a fictive IT consulting firm director you ask a social psychologist to investigate career anchors of the graduate students you want to hire, you can adapt your employer brand, become more attractive and resolve your lack of skilled employees.
Bibliography :
Arthur, M.B. and Rousseau, D.M. (1996). The boudaryless career : A new employment principle for a new organizational era. Oxford : Oxford University Press.
Bastid, F. and Bravo, B. (2006). Réussir sa carrière : approche conceptuelle. In A. El Akremi, S. Guerrero and J.P. Neveu (dir.), Comportement organisationnel volume 2 : Justice organisationnelle, enjeux de carrière et épuisement professionnel (p. 143-167). Bruxelles : De Boeck.
Hall, D.T. (1996). Protean careers of the 21st century. Academy of Management Executive, 10, 8-16.
Martineau, Y., Wils, T. and Tremblay, M. (2001). La multiplicité des ancres de carrière chez les ingénieurs québécois : impacts sur les cheminements et le succès de carrière. Montréal : CIRANO.
Schein, E.H. (1978). Career Dynamics : Matching individual and organizational needs. Boston : Addison Wesley.
Schein, E.H. (1990). Career anchors, discovering your real values. San Francisco : Jossey Bass.
[Digest written by Annaël Joubert and Stephane Lamouret]
My name is Stephane and I’m 27 years old.
I’m from the north of France but i live in Nantes since I started studying Psychology in 2008. Three years ago, I became a primary school teacher but I later chose to finish my Psychology studies. Indeed, I want to become a Human Resource consultant after graduation