Organizational career management practices and objective career success: A systematic review and framework

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2018.08.001Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We propose a framework which relates career management practices and career success.

  • We identify contingency factors affecting the efficacy of career management practices.

  • We conduct a systematic review of 73 empirical articles.

  • We develop propositions for future research.

Abstract

The theorization of the relationship between organizational investments in career development and individual success remains underdeveloped, and empirical tests of this relationship, which have been dispersed among several disciplinary areas, have produced inconsistent results. Addressing these issues, the purpose of this article is to propose a theoretical framework that illustrates why and how organizational career management practices translate into career success and under what circumstances the relationship is effective. Using a systematic review of empirical studies on career management practices and objective success, we identify three theoretical mechanisms - developmental, informational, and relational - and two groups of contingency factors that explain this relationship. Our framework advances the extant literature on organizational career management and provides suggestions to companies for designing effective career management systems.

Introduction

Organizational career management (OCM) refers to the activities companies carry out to sustain their employees' career development (Baruch & Peiperl, 2000), helping them obtain promotions and pay raises, and assisting their transition into leadership positions (Vinkenburg & Weber, 2012). Over the last twenty-five years, the career literature has conceptualized “new” career models (e.g., boundaryless career, protean career) centered on individuals' proactivity (Arthur & Rousseau, 2001; Hall, 1996; Tomlinson, Baird, Berg, & Cooper, 2018) and it has acknowledged that career success has evolved into a concept broader than pay and status alone (Ng, Eby, Sorensen, & Feldman, 2005). Notwithstanding, research and practice have continued to place organizational career management, which aims at feeding the “talent pipeline”, among the most important challenges for organizations' human resources (HR) function (Clarke, 2013; De Vos & Cambré, 2017; Koch, Forgues, & Monties, 2017).

Theoretical research on OCM, which dates back to the 1970s (e.g., Bowen & Hall, 1977; Walker, 1978), initially focused on providing companies with guidelines and advice on the design of effective succession plans and later on the definition of OCM practices that either individually (Baruch, 1996, Baruch, 1999) or as systems (Gunz, 1989; Lepak & Snell, 1999; Sonnenfeld & Peiperl, 1988) can support employees in reaching their career goals. However, with the exception of Rosenbaum's (1984) seminal work, which subsequent career studies have substantially overlooked, no authors have proposed a theoretical explanation of the relationship between organizational investments in career management and career success. The empirical research on career management is fragmented, since studies have been published in a variety of disciplinary areas (e.g., vocational psychology, labor economics, HR management), have tested OCM practices (e.g., mentoring, training, assessment centers) in isolation (e.g., ⁎Dreher & Ash, 1990; ⁎Georgakakis, Dauth, & Ruigrok, 2016; ⁎Jansen & Vinkenburg, 2006) and have achieved ambiguous results (e.g., ⁎Fagenson, 1989; ⁎Whitely & Coetsier, 1993). Thus, no consolidated empirical research has stated the effectiveness of OCM practices either as single practices or as a system of practices (De Vos, Dewettinck, & Buyens, 2008).

We contribute to the theoretical and empirical career literature by proposing a theoretical framework that illustrates the relationship between OCM practices and individuals' objective career success (OCS). In developing this framework, we perform a systematic review (Denyer & Tranfield, 2009) of the empirical research that tests the effectiveness of OCM practices on OCS. This review approach is particularly appropriate for our research purpose since it can help us ascertain why and how a relationship between two variables occurs and under what circumstances it is most effective (Denyer & Tranfield, 2009, p. 682). In addition, the systematic review is useful in research on topics such as career development and success, which are characterized by interdisciplinary literature and empirical studies that adopt various definitions, measurements, and participants (Arthur, Hall, & Lawrence, 1989; Gunz & Peiperl, 2007).

Our theoretical framework makes two primary contributions to the career literature. First, it defines three theoretical mechanisms - developmental, informational, and relational - that explain how and why organizational investments in career development translate into individual career success, a topic that the literature has largely overlooked (e.g., Rosenbaum, 1984). The framework also advances the career literature that measures the diffusion of OCM practices (e.g., Baruch, 1996; Gutteridge & Otte, 1983) but does not explain how they produce their effects. This process must be described and understood both if career theory is to overcome a purely descriptive and “atheoretical” approach to career development (Baruch & Peiperl, 2000) and if companies and HR departments are to make well-guided investments in employees' development (Cappelli & Keller, 2014). These benefits are possible because the proposed framework offers a theoretically sound and evidence-based (Gill, 2018) explanation of the effects of OCM practices on individual career success. Second, since our review focuses on empirical studies, we provide an overview of OCM practices' efficacy in affecting OCS. In doing so, we identify and include in our framework two sets of contingency factors that can affect the relationship between OCM practices and individual career success - that is, factors that explain under what circumstances this relationship holds. This effort can also guide HR departments in identifying career development practices that can be effective in organizations, given their specific contingencies.

According to Orpen (1994, p. 28), OCM refers to “practices deliberately established by organizations, to improve the career effectiveness of their employee, establishing what employees want from their careers, providing appropriate career opportunities for employees, identifying which employees deserve these opportunities and then providing them”. These practices include a wide range of programs and interventions (De Vos et al., 2008) that companies design “to promote and contribute to business goals [while giving individuals] the opportunity to fulfill their personal needs and aspirations” (Doyle, 2000, p. 229). In an analysis of the evolution of the organizational career models, Clarke (2013) showed that in many companies, employees take responsibility for their career management, but the organization continues to support their professional development through career management initiatives.

Rosenbaum's (1984) seminal work explained the theoretical rationale that relates organizational investment to individual career development. Building on Turner's (1960)) contribution, Rosenbaum applied to organizational career management the notion of “sponsored mobility”, as opposed to the predictions of human capital theory (Becker, 1964), which posits that individual achievements are the result of individuals' abilities and investments in education and training and that there are no barriers to career mobility, as individuals control the investments that determine their careers. Rosenbaum (1984) suggested instead that individual investments in developmental actions are lower and not comparable to those made by organizations, which invest primarily in “chosen” individuals who have the potential to grow into leadership positions (Spence, 1973). Given the difficulty and the costs involved in obtaining information about employees' abilities and potential, employers use information such as their past jobs, when they have advanced, and the rate at which they have advanced (Rosenbaum, 1984) as signals of their abilities and potential. In a dynamic process that occurs over time, organizational investments convert into individual achievements, which are both the starting point for further career development and the basis for selecting those who will advance in the corporate hierarchy.

The process Rosenbaum (1984) sketched is one of the rare efforts to define theoretically the organizational mechanisms through which companies sustain individual career development. Studies published in the 1970s focused primarily on career planning (e.g., Bowen & Hall, 1977; Walker, 1978) and offered companies practical solutions for the design of their succession plans. Since most studies published after the beginning of the 1980s (e.g., Baruch, 1996, Baruch, 1999) were concerned with the diffusion and implementation of OCM practices in companies, the mechanisms Rosenbaum (1984) outlined remained substantially implicit and neglected in most of the subsequent career studies (Baruch, Szűcs, & Gunz, 2015).

While the definitions of OCM converge in identifying it as a set of practices, there is little consensus on the specific practices involved, which number anywhere from nine (Gutteridge & Otte, 1983) to thirty-two (Gutteridge, 1993). Table 1 compares the lists of practices proposed by the literature, which repeat several activities but differ with respect to labels, content, and the number of practices.

The practices most frequently included in these lists are (see Baruch, 2003 for a larger set of definitions): career counselling, which is the process of discussing with employees their current job activities and performance, personal skills, and career development objectives; succession planning, which supports the identification and development of key individuals for executive positions; and career-planning workshops that help employees make career decisions and set goals through the discussion with other people in similar situations and/or human resources professionals. Other practices frequently included in these lists are job postings, an internal recruitment channel that gives employees the opportunity to apply to fill vacancies in the organization; outplacement and preretirement programs that help sustain workers during job transitions; assessment centers for the evaluation of workers' competences and potential; dual-ladder systems, which provide promotions and rewards to employees based on their career orientation (i.e., technical/scientific versus managerial); and mentoring programs that support workers with the personal and professional insights of experienced individuals.

Although organizations tend to offer OCM practices in combination (Baruch, 1999), there is no “generally accepted typology of OCM practices” (De Vos et al., 2008, p. 162). A few theoretical and empirical studies have suggested how OCM practices work as groups, but they have had a limited impact on the later career literature. The major theoretical effort in this case is represented by the career systems models, which are frameworks that link the organizational structure's characteristics (Gunz, 1989), organizational strategy (Sonnenfeld & Peiperl, 1988), and individual competencies (Lepak & Snell, 1999) to the investments organizations should devote to employees to support their career development. On the empirical side, building on exploratory studies, a few authors (i.e., Baruch & Peiperl, 2000; De Vos et al., 2008; Eby, Allen, & Brinley, 2005) have proposed categorizations of OCM practices based on their adoption by companies and how they support individual professional development.

One of the main limitations of these studies is that they do not consider the effect of the proposed OCM typologies or taxonomies on OCS, so they neglect OCM activities' original goal. We know from the career literature that career success can be both subjective, referring to an individual's satisfaction with all aspects of his or her career (Greenhaus, Parasuraman, & Wormley, 1990), and objective, referring to tangible professional achievement as evaluated by others (Judge, Cable, Boudreau, & Bretz, 1995). The primary purpose of OCM practices is to support employees' professional achievements based on organizational goals by rewarding them with promotions (e.g., ⁎Campion, Cheraskin, & Stevens, 1994; ⁎Cannings, 1988; ⁎Wakabayashi & Graen, 1984), salary (e.g., ⁎Dohmen, Kriechel, & Pfann, 2004; ⁎Suutari & Brewster, 2003; ⁎Turban & Dougherty, 1994), and movement to the upper echelons (e.g., ⁎Bozionelos, 2003; ⁎Kirchmeyer, 1998; ⁎Tharenou, Latimer, & Conroy, 1994). In other words, companies provide OCM activities with the primary purpose of increasing the individual's productivity and professional development, so subjective career success is, from the organization's point of view, a byproduct of this process.

Moving from the limitations of the theoretical and empirical OCM literature, we use a systemic literature review to develop an overarching framework (the “OCM-OCS framework” hereafter) that explains the theoretical rationale (the why) and the mechanisms (the how) that underlie the relationship between OCM practices and OCS.

We make two primary contributions to the career literature. First, we contribute to the “thin” (Baruch & Peiperl, 2000, p. 348) theoretical basis of OCM that, with the notable exception of Rosenbaum (1984), has not explained the relationship between OCM practices and career success. The purpose of our framework is to develop Rosenbaum's (1984) career process, which did not describe which OCM practices are involved in individuals' career development and their effects on career attainment. In this way, we also add to the career literature that has proposed various classifications of OCM practices but has never considered their effects on OCS as a criterion for grouping them. Second, our theoretical framework includes the contingency factors (under what circumstances) that affect the main relationship. Drawing on the results of the empirical studies that are included in the systematic review, we identify the conditions under which OCM practices can be more or less effective in increasing individual career success, thereby contributing to the empirical literature on OCM practices and providing managerial implications. Finally, our framework and its functioning inform the formulation of a set of research propositions that can guide future empirical research.

Section snippets

Method

Denyer and Tranfield (2009, p. 671) defined the systematic review as “a specific methodology that locates existing studies, selects and evaluates contributions, analyses and synthesizes data, and reports the evidence in such a way that allows reasonably clear conclusions to be reached about what is and is not known”. Unlike narrative approaches, systematic reviews are based on replicable methods that minimize bias related to the identification, selection, and analysis of studies. In reviewing

Results

Our review reveals the theoretical underpinnings of the relationship between OCM practice and OCS (the results of this analysis and the main characteristics of the reviewed articles are in Table 3). Our study confirms the theoretical fragmentation of the literature and shows that more than a third of the studies (25 out of 73) are “atheoretical”, as the hypothesized relationship between OCM practice and OCS is not explicitly sustained by any theory. In some cases, the lack of a theoretical

Framework development and propositions

Our systematic review identified three mechanisms - developmental, informational, and relational - through which OCM practices increase the individual's competencies, provide the organization with information for promotion decisions, give individuals feedback they can use for development, and create relationships that enhance the individual's visibility and promotion chances. Each of the papers we reviewed presented a partial view of the process that leads to career success. By recombining,

Discussion and conclusion

Despite the steady managerial and academic interest in OCM, this field of study remains theoretically underdeveloped and empirically fragmented. Our systematic review of the research on the relationship between OCM practices and OCS addresses these issues by proposing a theoretical framework.

Building on the results of the review, the OCM-OCS framework offers a comprehensive view of the theoretical reasons (why) and mechanisms (how) through which OCM practices affect career success, and it

Limitations and future research

Our framework has several limitations. First, although our research focuses on organizational careers, the social and political changes that have become particularly evident since the 1990s (Baruch et al., 2015) have favored the diffusion of flexible and adaptive careers. These new career models (e.g., boundaryless, protean) are generally characterized by individuals' increased centrality in their career management by means of career self-management activities, a desire for mobility and

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