What it Means to Succeed: Personal Conceptions of Career Success Held by Male and Female Managers at Different Ages
| Date | 01 September 1999 |
| Author | Jane Sturges |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.00130 |
| Published date | 01 September 1999 |
Introduction
Career success continues to be represented both
in academic research (e.g. O’Reilly and Chatman,
1994) and popular literature (e.g. Mercer, 1994)
as something which can be objectively determined,
and is measured solely through external criteria
such as hierarchical position and salary level. This
view persists despite evidence to the contrary that
managers do not regard their own career suc-
cess in terms of these criteria alone (e.g. Gattiker
and Larwood, 1988; Korman, Wittig-Berman and
Lang, 1981) and regardless of changes in organ-
izational career structures which make success by
advancement less available to individuals than it
was in the past (Arnold, 1997a).
The research findings reported in this article
represent a response to the question of ‘what is
success’ (Sekaran and Hall, 1989) for managers.
They explore in depth managers’ personal defin-
itions of career success, in order to provide the
basis for a conceptualization of what success
means to individuals: the ways in which people
talk about career success were seen to provide
a useful starting point from which a theory
which encapsulates individual as well as organ-
izational notions of career success might be
developed.
British Journal of Management, Vol. 10, 239–252 (1999)
What it Means to Succeed:
Personal Conceptions of Career Success
Held by Male and Female Managers
at Different Ages1
Jane Sturges
Department of Organizational Psychology, Birkbeck College, University of London, Malet Street,
London WC1E 7HX, UK
This paper describes the findings of a qualitative study which analyses how man-
agers define career success for themselves on their own terms. In exploring career
success from the perspective of the individual, not the organization, the research
attempts to fill an identifiable gap in the career literature. The paper examines the
criteria which individuals use to describe what career success means to them, and
expresses them by means of a series of orientational categories – Climbers, Experts, In-
fluencers and Self-Realizers – which classify the different ways in which managers talk
about career success. The variations in the way that the male and female, and older and
younger, research participants describe what career success means to them are dis-
cussed and compared. The women managers and older managers who took part in the
study appear less inclined to define career success in terms of hierarchical and financial
progression: the paper considers the implications of this for individuals and for
organizations.
© 1999 British Academy of Management
1The author thanks Rob Briner for his comments on
an earlier version of this paper.
To continue reading
Request your trial