Snakes and ladders: stressing the role of meta-competencies for post ...

Int J Educ Vocat Guidance (2009) 9:125–134 DOI 10.1007/s10775-009-9157-0

Snakes and ladders: stressing the role of meta-competencies for post-modern careers Alessandro Lo Presti

Received: 2 January 2008 / Accepted: 10 September 2008 / Published online: 19 March 2009 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract Major global changes during the last decades have influenced the individual’s work-life and career. As a result of globalisation, increasing societal complexity and flexibility, careers have lost their linearity and predictability. Traditional models of career development no longer provide a comprehensive explanation for an adequate career development. New theoretical concepts such as protean and boundaryless career attitudes are presented as options to cope with the new situation. In addition, the development of career meta-competencies and skills are introduced as an approach to foster career self-management. Re´sume´. Serpents et ećhelles: souligner le roˆle des me´ta-compe´tences pour les carrie`res post-modernes. Les changements globaux importants des dernie`res dećennies ont influence´ la vie de travail et la carrie`re de l’individu. En raison de la mondialisation, de la complexite´ et de la flexibilite´ sociales croissantes, les carrie`res ont perdu leur lineárite´ et leur pre´visibilite´. Les mode`les traditionnels du de´veloppement de la vie professionnelle ne fournissent plus une explication comple`te pour le de´veloppement d’une vie professionnelle harmonieuse. Nous pre´sentons de nouveaux concepts theóriques tels que des attitudes de carrie`re proteíformes et de´gageés de toute limitation comme des possibilite´s de faire face a` la nouvelle situation. En outre, on pre´sente le de´veloppement de me´ta-compe´tences et de qualifications de carrie`re comme une approche susceptible de stimuler l’autogestion de la carrie`re. Zusammenfassung. Schlangen und Leitern: Betonung der Bedeutung von Meta-Kompetenzen fu¨r postmoderne Berufsverlaüfe. Gro¨ßere globale Vera¨nderungen wa¨hrend der letzten Jahrzehnte haben das Arbeitsleben und die Berufsverlaüfe der Menschen beeinflusst. Als Ergebnis der Globalisierung, die die A. Lo Presti (&) Dipartimento di Psicologia, Seconda Universita` degli studi di Napoli, Via Vivaldi 43, Caserta, Italy e-mail: [email protected]

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Int J Educ Vocat Guidance (2009) 9:125–134

gesellschaftliche Komplexita¨t und Flexibilita¨t gesteigert hat, haben Berufsverlaüfe ihre Linearita¨t und Vorhersagbarkeit verloren. Traditionelle Modelle der Beruflichen Beratung stellen nicht mehr la¨nger eine umfassende Erkla¨rung fu¨r die angemessene Entwicklung von Berufsverlaüfen bereit. Neue theoretische Konzepte, wie etwa wandelbare und grenzenlose Karriere-Konzepte, erden als Optionen vorgestellt, um mit den neuen Verha¨ltnissen umzugehen. Daru¨ber hinaus wird die Entwicklung von Meta-Kompetenzen und –Fa¨higkeiten als ein Ansatz vorgestellt, die Selbststeuerung der beruflichen Karriere zu fo¨rdern. Resumen. El juego de las escaleras y culebras: Acentuando el rol de las meta-competencias para las carreras post-modernas. Los cambios globales ocurridos durante las u´ltimas dećadas estań influyendo la vida laboral del individuo y su carrera profesional. Como resultado de la globalizacioń, y de una mayor complejidad y flexibilidad de la sociedad, las carreras han perdido su linealidad y predictibilidad. Los modelos tradicionales del desarrollo de la carrera ya no proporcionan una explicacioń comprensiva para el adecuado desarrollo de la carrera. Surgen otras opciones para manejar esta situacioń, como puede ser el adoptar actitudes flexibles, sin lı´mites, teniendo una mente abierta para aceptar los cambios y adaptarse a nuevas situaciones. Adema´s, se introduce el desarrollo de las meta-competencias y habilidades para la carrera como una estrategia para fomentar la auto-gestioń. Keywords

Career Flexibility Adaptability

There is a wide consent among scholars that major changes that have occurred in our world in the last thirty years have had a great influence on the way people live their jobs and enact their vocational behaviour. Several labels (third way, postmodern society, knowledge society, etc.) have been used to describe these changes, but globalisation remains the most used term. Recently, Beck (1999), in coining the label ‘‘reflexive globalisation’’, gave an original explanation of these phenomena by bridging over the interplay between social, political and economic variables. National economies and markets are destabilised by the action of trans-national economic forces, which impose neo-liberal reforms and cause a fragmentation of society by destabilising the middle class. Reflexive globalisation implies a complex dynamics of forces such as: (a) movements of capital become trans-national, and make politics and trade unions lose their influence; phases like investment, production, distribution, marketing, and tax payments have become independent and can be located in different countries; (b) at the same time there is local disintegration and global integration of groups and communities; (c) jobs lose their physical and spatial dimensions; while in the past workers used to move from one place to another in search of a good job, now jobs move across countries looking for favourable conditions, i.e. adequate facilities, nonunionised and trained workforce (i.e. green-fields), stable political and low-taxation conditions. All these aspects contribute to upset the individual’s work experiences, something that Beck (1999) has called ‘‘Brazilianisation of the west’’. It involves

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the convergence of the economic and social developmental tendencies of the West and so called Third World. This convergence features—in opposition to the standardization of western labour relations—the emergence of precariousness, i.e. the imposition of flexible, informal, precarious and discontinuous labour contracts, until recently typical of underdeveloped economies. According to, e.g., Herzenberg, Alic, and Wial (1998), traditional certainties about job continuity seem to be fading. One of the main effects of the so-called new economy is ‘‘economic anxiety’’, caused by decreasing salaries, low vertical mobility for low-profile workers, and job insecurity affecting the middle-class. Particularly, it is argued that flexibility has different effects on different categories of workers—a distinction not often made in modern vocational psychology, always striving to conciliate nomothetic and idiographic approaches. Such phenomena have direct and far reaching influences on people’s careers. Careers are becoming more boundaryless (Arthur & Rousseau, 1996; DeFillippi & Arthur, 1996), more protean (Hall, 1996), and there is an increasing interest in concepts like agency (Betz & Hackett, 1987), adaptability (Savickas, 2005), and employability (Fugate, Kinicki, & Ashforth, 2004). At the same time, vocational psychology challenges new problems or ‘‘ostensible’’ new problems. Our discipline should be prepared for a post-modern society (Van Esbroeck, 2007), there is a shared need for developing new methods of inquiry (McMahon & Watson, 2007), even the study of careers should be reinvigorated (Savickas, 2002). One of the main debates is concerned with work flexibility, and its influence on the way people manage and appraise their careers (Hall & Mirvis, 1995). Scholars have proposed different models for the relation between career patterns, vocational behaviour and context requests (Savickas, 2005). There is still some controversy around whether vocational psychology is a typical middle-class tool or can develop comprehensive and specific models and strategies for different segments of the workforce and cultures. This article will reflect on some topics related to the boundary between vocational and industrial/organisational psychology: (a) to give a comprehensive description of modern career antecedents: globalisation, complexity and flexibility; (b) to examine how careers have changed and how scholars appraise these changes; (c) to stress the role of career meta-competencies and skills as a tool to help practitioners to support their clients to manage their careers.

Work is changing or who is changing work? Vocational psychology should extend its conceptual and empirical focus to turn into ‘‘psychology-of-working’’ (Coutinho, Dam, & Blustein, 2008). The need for this change is justified by the turbulences involving the global market and the quality of work: career paths are less likely to be continuous, stable and progressive, consistent with shared cultural expectations. Two major phenomena have occurred to change this picture. Firstly, the pyramidal and static organization has often been replaced by the so called ‘‘3F organization’’ (Hall & Mirvis, 1995): free, fast and facile. ‘‘Free’’ means having an internal segmentation in functional unities, leaving them enough

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freedom to react autonomously to external requests; ‘‘fast’’ means being able to adapt quickly to changed conditions (either internal or external); and finally, ‘‘facile’’ regards the development of meta-competencies like learning to learn. The second phenomenon refers to a progressive, but incontrovertible change in basic social structures: the traditional male breadwinning based/rooted family unit has been replaced by new entities, determined by the instabilities of marriages, the increasing numbers of adults living alone, changes in child-bearing patterns (due to new fertility technologies), diverse family patterns such as gay and lesbian marriages, increasing longevity, etc. (Richardson, 2002). Requests from both organisational and family domains oblige individuals to adapt their work-experiences, something defined as work flexibility. Originally, flexibility meant the ability of trees branches to bend without breaking and having the ability to come back to their initial condition (Sennett, 1998). This original meaning is perfectly congruent to workers, who often experience flexibility as an external imposition, rather than an autonomous choice. Flexibility is definitively an ambiguous term; it is often the employer who gives its own meaning to it, leaving the employee to accept it or quit the job. Organisational systems, characterized by flexibility, have three main features (Sennett, 1998): (a) discontinuous reinvention of institutions, i.e. processes of organisational change, such as de-layering and reengineering processes, which upset assets; (b) flexible specialisation of production, based on the mutable requests of competition and consumers; and (c) concentration without centralisation of power, that is, in spite of the fact that teamworking seems to give more freedom and autonomy to workers, technology advancements have a closer over their actions, if necessary saddling team-working with possible failures. Considering the interplay between flexibility and globalisation, a third variable should be included, i.e. complexity, which arises from different sources: new life roles and themes, interactions between different spheres of our world (economics, culture, etc.), and new technologies (Hall & Mirvis, 1995). These three interrelated phenomena: globalisation, complexity and flexibility have definitively changed people’s experience of work: work is a central part of life to many people; to some it is a minor aspect; to others a means of survival. The new, lonely certainty is that jobs are going to change frequently in every individual’s life, either because internal contents are going to vary and because people will be supposed to change jobs more frequently than previously; work choice is an oxymoron (Fouad, 2007) and the same could be argued about job stability or job security. A new word, ‘‘flexicurity’’, refers to the individual perception of being relatively sure about the continuity of one’s own job, in an environment characterized by flexibility. Since job continuity was intrinsically part of traditional career models, present changes make these models inadequate and call for new conceptualisations.

Careers as board-games: from the game of the goose to snakes and ladders Recently, nine key metaphors (Inkson, 2004) have been proposed (careers as: inheritance, construction, cycle, fit, journey, relationship, role, resource and story) to examine careers through different angles and reach a deeper understanding. Here, a

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new metaphor is suggested and described: careers can be meant as board-games. In board-games, players have an active role and build a story (compare with three Inkson’s meanings: construction, role, and story); they usually use resources like dice or cards (i.e. resource) to move across a series of steps (i.e. journey); sometimes they go forwards, sometimes backwards (i.e. cycle); sometimes they are expelled; finally, playing is a social situation as well, so players can plan their strategies against their rivals or allies (i.e. relationship), or request someone’s help and play together (resource, inheritance); players definitely vary in how they enjoy the game (i.e. fit) (Table 1). This metaphor is a preliminary to a central issue in post-modern vocational psychology: careers have lost their traditional predictability and linearity. Career paths are no longer simply linear, but have evolved to include possible spiral development (Baruch, 2004), for example, by viewing people moving around different functions within the organisation on their way up or across different occupational areas (career pandemonium, Brousseau, Driver, Eneroth, & Larsson, 1996). Secondly, a simile is operated. By comparing the traditional linear career to the ‘‘game of the goose’’, players will follow an established and linear sequence of steps, and changes of direction will be unlikely to happen, because the path is constrained. Otherwise, careers viewed as exemplified by ‘‘snakes and ladders’’, see players moving across boxes, are able to bound forward using ladders, and fall back into snakes’ mouths; at the same time, new careers can be characterised by sudden changes of direction, either forwards-backwards, and laterally. Even the traditional meaning of career involved movement and progression in some definitely linear way; traditional developmental career theories such as Table 1 Careers as board-games and Inkson’s metaphors Features of board-games

Career actors as playing their careers

Inkson’s metaphors

Game play and Role play

Individuals manage their own careers, have an active role and build their own narratives

Construction, role, story

Game resources (dices, cards)

Individuals rest on their personal (human capitals, etc.) and social resources (support, networks, etc.) to drive their careers

Resources

Steps and movement

Individuals progress forward, return backward or even remain steady in their career growth, They experience career progression as a story or a journey where they are either the main character, the director and the scriptwriter

Journey, cycle

Other players and game support

Other people play an important role for the individual as: colleagues, relatives, teachers, employers, etc.

Relationship, inheritance

Amusement

Individuals enjoy their career through the fit between their work values, their social and human capital and job demands and resources

Fit

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Super’s (1980) depicted the worker going through a series of life stages or life tasks, something later called career or work transitions. Emerging career paths are now multidirectional, dynamic and fluid (Baruch, 2004), as opposed to the traditional career seen as linear, static and rigid. Careers have become transitional, flexible, and even the idea of success has changed, because of the breakdown of traditional ‘‘up the ladders’’ organisational routes. Now careers have become fuzzy; scholars have even conceptualised a chaos theory of careers (Pryor & Bright, 2007). There is now the largely shared view that rather than going through major transitions over the lifespan (Super, 1980), people are increasingly experiencing sets of ‘‘ministages’’ (Hall & Mirvis, 1995; Mirvis & Hall, 1994) or short-cycle learning stages, of exploration-trial-mastery-exit; this phenomenon is caused by the continuous learning demands that are put on workers. Scholars have progressively realised that work transitions can be either voluntary or involuntary, and that each kind involves specific psycho-social phenomena. Since the issue of the non-voluntary nature of transitions is central to the study of careers and to the whole of vocational psychology, scholars should reconsider and critically analyse established and emerging career theories to highlight this point.

New theories for the new careers The issue of careers is attracting growing attention from other disciplines such as management and sociology; there is a compelling debate about the integration of different disciplinary contributions towards a comprehensive view of careers. Many new contributions have been proposed to the academic debate: contextualism (Richardson, 2002), social constructionism (Cohen, Duberley, & Mallon, 2004) and chaos theory of careers (Pryor & Bright, 2007), etc. Two of them are mostly congruent to the issue of flexibility: the protean career (Hall, 1996) and the boundaryless career (Arthur & Rousseau, 1996). In the last years, there has been a shift in many psychological contracts between employees and employers; from the relational contract, based on a long-term mutual commitment, to the relationship, workers are shifting to more transactional ones, based on shorter-term exchanges of benefits and services (Hall & Mirvis, 1995). While traditional contracts viewed workers as passive, and employee-employer relation was based on employee loyalty in exchange for job security, for the individual career development managed by the personnel department, and finally for a career advancement on the basis of job tenure; new contracts view workers as exchanging organisational performance for continuous learning and marketability, while there is a decrease in employee loyalty and job security and an increased worker cynicism. The protean career centres on Hall’s (1996) conception of psychological success resulting from individual career management, as opposed to career development by the organization. A protean career is characterised as involving greater mobility, a more whole-life perspective, and a developmental progression. The protean career is based upon individual goals, encompassing the whole life space, as well as being driven by psychological success rather than objective success such as pay, rank, or

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power (Hall, 2002). Individuals who hold protean career attitudes are intent upon using their own values (versus organisational values for example) to guide their career (values-driven) and take an independent role in managing their vocational behaviour (self-directed). An individual who did not hold protean attitudes would be more likely to borrow external standards, as opposed to internally developed ones, and be more likely to seek external direction and assistance in behavioural career management as opposed to being more proactive and independent (Briscoe, Hall, & De Muth, 2006). The protean career underlines new dimensions of flexibility and autonomy, providing new ways to think about time and its management. Another kind of flexibility provided by the protean career is the enlargement of career space. It recalls the overlap between work and non-work roles and themes, allowing people to better integrate these aspects toward attaining psychological success (Mirvis & Hall, 1994). In sum, a protean career attitude involves more horizontal growth, the development of a wider range of competencies and professional networking. The goals are learning, the expansion of identity and a proactive and autonomous search for psychological success (Hall & Mirvis, 1995). As said before, one main effect of globalisation is the de-verticalisation of hierarchical traditional organizations. The results are federal organisations featuring three ‘‘leaves’’ in their work-force: core full-time, independent contractors and contingent workers. The concept of boundaryless career is central to the last two categories, probably even the first one. According to Sullivan and Arthur (2006), a boundaryless career mindset, implies someone who navigates the changing work landscape by enacting a career which ‘‘involves different levels of physical and psychological movement’’ (p. 22). As it may concern the notion of psychological boundarylessness, career actors will vary in the attitude that they hold toward initiating and pursuing work-related relationships across organisational boundaries. This does not necessarily imply physical or employment mobility. Thus, a person with a high boundaryless attitude toward working relationships across organisational boundaries is comfortable, even enthusiastic about creating and sustaining active relationships beyond these boundaries. Despite protean and boundaryless careers are independent yet related constructs (Briscoe et al., 2006), they both stress the active role of the individual in successfully adapting to the changing work environment; therefore a central issue for practitioners will be to help clients to become able self-manage their careers, this connects to the issue of career meta-competencies (Hall & Mirvis, 1995).

Conclusions Scholars and practitioners progressively realised that identifying and coping with learning demands imposed by the changing environment are going to be the key elements in helping clients to manage successful careers. Post-modern environment places developmental demands on the individual for two meta-competencies: identity growth and increased adaptability (Hall & Mirvis, 1995). Career (sub)identity refers to the way the person views him or herself in the career work

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role. Career sub-identity development and differentiation (i.e. incorporating perceptions of more skills, knowledge, abilities, values, experiences, etc.) foster career development in a self-reinforcing spiral of success experiences in one’s work (Hall, 1986). Adaptability is rather the readiness and resources that an individual has to complete the developmental tasks associated with career development (Savickas, 1997). Workers are called to develop and adopt these two meta-competencies to manage their careers through a lifelong learning perspective. On the other hand, they need to learn and use more specific career skills, which can be intended as useful tools to manage careers. An intelligent career (Arthur, Claman, & DeFillippi, 1995) implies the mastery of a series of career skills as: 1.

2. 3.

know why: that is knowing the determinants of own individual vocational behaviour, knowing why we like or dislike a job/activity (interests), which aspects and features of work we like (values), how we can improve our performance at work (attitudes), what we are looking for in our jobs (internal needs), how our jobs fit in with what we think about ourselves (identity), and lifestyles; know how: that is developing the most effective competencies to be successful career actors: competencies, skills, expertise, etc.; know whom: that is being able to examine the life space and identify important stakeholders to build significant relationships (friends, relatives, family) and networks (colleagues, unions, employers). In addition, Jones and DeFillippi (1996) have proposed three new categories:

4. 5. 6.

know what: that is being able to develop adequate ‘‘reading’’ competencies of the environment, in terms of opportunities, constraints, barriers and requirements; know where: that is the ability to give the right direction to one’s careers; know when: that is developing timing competencies about career choices and planning, doing the ‘‘seemingly’’ more right thing at the right time.

Figure 1 The interplay between career meta-competencies and skills

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Figure 1 shows the interplay between these variables. The environment (in its multiple economic, social, cultural, technological facets) requests the individual to shape his/her vocational behaviour to successfully manage his/her career. Identity growth and adaptability represent the two main meta-competencies to drive this process through exchange and feedback (see curved arrows). At the same time both meta-competencies influence how successful the individual is in developing specific career skills and afterwards in adaptively reacting to environmental barriers and opportunities which affect career management. To go back to the snakes and ladders’ metaphor, one can argue that the successful career player should be able to: enter the game because motivated, know the game rules (how to play), interact effectively with the other players (whom to play with), try to win having clear goals (what should be done to win), develop strategies to win (where the piece should be moved to reach the winning square) and have the skill to enact them at the right time (play when it is his/her own turn). Vocational psychology, through its theoretical models and its intervention practices must become a tool for increasing the career meta-competencies of our clients. The post-modern society burdens the individual with the need to adapt his/ her vocational behaviour to a changing environment. In this view, adaptability and identity growth are powerful tools to successfully succeed in these tasks. Practitioners should operate on two levels with their clients: on an inner one, they should work on meta-competencies; in this sense, referring to Argyris and Scho¨n (1978), practitioners should foster double-loop instead of single-loop learning; on an more external level, increased identity growth and adaptability should autonomously promote the development of career skills, while the counsellor plays a supporting role. The issue of career meta-competencies and skills is central to both human resources management, and vocational guidance. The future of vocational psychology rests on its ability to provide useful methods to help people adapt to a rapidly changing world of work (Palladino Schultheiss, 2007). Scholars should overhaul their methods (or even propose new ones), and practitioners are called upon to help workers to become aware of their vocational identity (through identity growth) and external request (through developing adaptability); people should then be helped to develop specific career skills and allowed to manage their careers in an intelligent, flexible and enjoyable way.

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