Need-Based Career Anchors by Edgar Schein

Career Anchors (Edgar Schein)

• Entrepreneurial Creativity: Enjoy creating new products or services, building new organizations, or taking over an existing business and reshaping it.
  • Rewards: Individual wealth, ownership, freedom, and power.
• Security / Stability: Prefer stable, predictable work with clearly defined goals and autonomy.
  • Rewards: Pay for performance, bonuses, autonomy-oriented promotion systems.
• Autonomy / Independence: Desire independence, freedom, and autonomy in work.
  • Rewards: Autonomy-oriented promotion systems, stable, predictable work.
• Service / Dedication to a Cause: Work towards improving the world in some manner, prefer helping professions.
  • Rewards: Sense of fulfillment, making a positive impact.

Dual-Earner Couple

• Three General Marital Patterns:
  1. Conventional Pattern: Both partners are career-oriented, but the woman bears most responsibility for children and household.
  2. Modern Pattern: Parenting role is shared equally, but the woman still takes responsibility for the household.
  3. Role-Sharing Pattern: Both spouses are actively involved in the household, roles as parents, and careers.

Work-Family Conflict

• Definition: Inter-role conflict where pressures from work and family are mutually incompatible in some respects.
• Types of Work-Family Conflict:
  1. Time-Based Conflict: Time demands make it physically impossible to be in two places simultaneously.
  2. Strain-Based Conflict: Pressure from work affects family life, causing strain.
  3. Behaviour-Based Conflict: Behaviour required at work is incompatible with family expectations.

Career Plateau

• Definition: A point in a person's career where there is no longer opportunity to progress in the organizational hierarchy, and chances for advancement are limited.
• Factors that Play a Role: Inappropriate abilities, low need for career mobility, people working for longer, lay-offs, high competition, organizational needs, and flatter organizational structures.
• Four Kinds of Plateaued Performers:
  1. Productively Pleasantly Plateaued: High employee actions, high organizational actions.
  2. Passively Plateaued: Low employee actions, high organizational actions.
  3. Partially Plateaued: High employee actions, low organizational actions.
  4. Negatively Plateaued: Low employee actions, low organizational actions.

Obsolescence

• Definition: The degree to which an organization's professionals lack up-to-date knowledge or skills necessary to maintain effective performance in either their current or future work roles.
• Three Personal Characteristics Associated with Low Levels of Obsolescence: High intellectual abilities, self-motivation, and personal adaptability.
• Work Obsolescence Model: Balance between worker and job, retrain for technology, modify organization, and treat workers' behavior.
• Organisational Actions to Reduce Obsolescence: Ensure proper training, educate the workforce, encourage growth, provide 360-degree feedback, implement periodic job changes, and encourage continuous learning.