Meaningful Careers

I'm updating my lecture on job satisfaction in preparation for the new term, and I've notice a lot of new articles about one particular aspect: meaningful work. It's hardly new as an idea - the very first researchers who were looking at the antecedents of job satisfaction back in the early part of the 20th century were aware that it was important for work to bring meaning to lives, and Hackman and Oldham's job characteristics model from 1976 included the idea of 'task significance' which is a similar concept. Then in the early part of this century there was some interest in meaning from fans of the Protean career (Hall and Mirvis, 1996) which conceptualises the ideal (Protean) career as one which is self-directed and values-driven. Dik and Duff too conducted considerable research into the idea of a vocation, which is a similar notion. But I do still see a bit of a rise in interest in the idea of meaningful work. 

I have been doing some research of my own which examines the factors which psychology undergraduates (n=423) feel are important to their job choices, and the number 1 factor is having a job that is meaningful (to themselves or to others). So it's clearly something that young people are looking for. 

The research which looks at the benefits seems quite compelling. Hu and Hirsh (2017) conducted a meta-analysis  (using 146 studies, n=70,000+) and found that from an individual perspective, meaningful work is linked to higher job satisfaction (and that's a correlation of 0.66, which is really quite high), hope, life meaning and life satisfaction (0.48, which again, for this kind of outcome is quite impressive). It also seems to reduce the chances of stress and burnout. For an organisation too, offering opportunities for meaningful work will reap rewards. The same meta-analysis saw meaningful work linked to higher levels of performance, commitment, engagement, organisational citizenship behaviours, and reduced negative behaviours and intention to quit.

The same authors also published a series of studies which demonstrated that people are prepared to accept lower salaries if they believe the work is meaningful to them. 

So what exactly is meaningful work? Lysova and colleagues (2018) suggest that it needs to feel personally fulfilling and worthwhile. It's linked to the idea of a vocation, but isn't quite the same - meaningful work predicts the likelihood of living your calling, but it lacks the transcendental summons aspect of a vocation. 

Lysova et al. conducted a review of the literature on this topic and came up with a multi-level framework which explains what meaningful work looks like and how it comes about. You can see that it integrates aspects of the individual, the job, the organisation and the social culture. 

Individual level	A positive personality and good job performance
	Someone who is intrinsically motivated to work for the greater good and who feels work volition
	Working collaboratively, with autonomy and work that syncs with ones self-concept
Job level	White-collar jobs which are adequately resourced. Feeling valued and being treated fairly
	Autonomy and the chance to craft the job
Organisational level	Great leadership and organisational communication
	Innovative, supportive and ethical culture. Lack of hierarchical culture.
	Career development support; CSR focus
	Good workplace relationships and social-moral culture
Societal factors	Access to decent work
	Cultural norms which emphasise work as a pathway to fulfillment and value individual fulfillment and wellbeing

This list leads to some useful suggestions for what we can do to make work more meaningful.

One of the key messages is about job crating. This is the process of changing aspects of the nature of a job once you are in post (Wrzesniewski, & Dutton, 2001). Job crafting has been linked to a number of positive personal and organisational outcomes, including meaningfulness. Meaningfulness is such a personal construct that it is not possible for an organisation to design a meaningful job as such, because what is meaningful to one person might not be to another. Instead, organisations needs to allow individuals the scope to craft their own jobs, and people need to make sure that they are carving out the role that will work for them. Job crafting works as individuals shape their jobs to give themselves more autonomy, more support and to spend less time on emotionally demanding projects. 


References
Hu, J., & Hirsh, J. (2017). The Benefits of Meaningful Work: A Meta-Analysis. In Academy of Management Proceedings (Vol. 2017, No. 1, p. 13866). Briarcliff Manor, NY 10510: Academy of Management.
Hu, J., & Hirsh, J. B. (2017). Accepting Lower Salaries for Meaningful Work. Frontiers in psychology, 8, 1649.
Lysova, E. I., Allan, B. A., Dik, B. J., Duffy, R. D., & Steger, M. F. (2018). Fostering meaningful work in organizations: A multi-level review and integration. Journal of Vocational Behavior.
Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. E. (2001). Crafting a job: Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Academy of management review, 26(2), 179-201.

Women's careers - what exactly is the problem?

Between the publicity around the gender pay gap, the Me Too campaign and the centenary of women getting the vote in the UK earlier this year, the issue of women's careers is very much on my mind. Arguments are sometimes made that there isn't really a problem with sexism in the UK, and that women have all the opportunities that men have, if only they chose to take advantage of them. But I think that's far too simplistic a reading of the situation.

In truth, it's a really complex and deeply entrenched situation. I have tried below to identify some of the different strands of arguments. I have simplified the arguments greatly to make my points clearly, and I talk in broad generalisations. The ideas of course do not apply to all in all contexts, but I think the claims I am making are widespread enough to make each of them problematic. 

So how do we know there is a problem?

1.) Positions of power and influence. Although women make up 50% of the workforce, they make up a far smaller proportion of the jobs which carry the most influence:  board members, cabinet officers, newspaper editors, CEOs of large companies, directors, conductors, partners etc.. This is problematic because i) diverse teams perform better, so these functions will be more effective if women as well as men are contributing to decisions and cultures, ii) because women are probably not being given the opportunities to fulfill their potential, and iii) because having one demographic group having power over another isn't likely to lead to decisions which offer the best opportunities to people in all demographic groups.
2.) Types of work. There are many jobs which are dominated by either men or women: nurses are predominantly women, software engineers are mostly men. This is potentially problematic because i) these jobs would probably be done better if there were a more diverse mix in the workforce and ii) the statistics might imply that men and women don't actually have enough free choice to pursue the most fulfilling job for them.
3.) Unpaid work. Our nation relies on a considerable amount of unpaid work in the home to function effectively: children need to be looked after, ageing parents cared for, meals cooked, laundry washed and homes cleaned. Women do a disproportionate amount of this work, and as a result of these responsibilities, women's paid work outside the home often takes second place. Because we live in the kind of society which values what it pays for, women end up undervalued both in their unpaid domestic work, and in their lower paid employment.

So if those are the symptoms, what are the causes? What has led to women and men opting for or being forced into different paths?

Social norms
1.) Parenting. Our culture has certain expectations which are deeply ingrained in us all. We have a clear sense of what makes a 'good mother' - warmth, nurturing, home baking, picking up from school at 3.30. And of what makes a 'good father' - fun, sport and earning a decent wage to provide for his family. It's hard for us to deviate from these social norms - it takes a lot of commitment and individual determination to convince yourself that you are a good mother when you don't conform to society's stereotypes. 
2.) Work role stereotypes: we also have assumptions about what kind of person excels in different kinds of occupations. We expect senior leaders to be men, and nurses to be women. These stereotypes have an influence on people making their career choices; on the people making the hiring decisions, and on our colleagues, customers and managers.
3.) Gendered behaviour: we expect men and women to behave differently, and we like people more when they behave in line with our expectations. For women wanting to move up in their careers, this is a particular challenge, as they find themselves caught in a double bind: to be liked they need to be feminine  and to be respected as leaders, they need to be masculine. 

Biology 
1.) Parenting. Women are the only ones who can give birth and breast feed. This should not be an insurmountable issue for us to address, but it does mean that the easy default position places women at the heart of child rearing whilst the men earn the wages. Women's propensity to give birth can also lead employers to feel that a 28 year old recently married man is more likely to be a better long term investment than his wife.
2.) Physiological differences. It's tricky to know exactly how much is down to social norms, and how much is down to biological differences, but it seems that there are some biological differences which could plausibly influence the kinds of jobs we are drawn to and the kinds of jobs we are good at. Men are generally stronger than women, so there are some jobs they will be more naturally capable of - this doesn't apply to that many jobs, and with technology, it's becoming less and less of an issue. Men are also generally more competitive than women and this I think poses more of a challenge: a competitive style will tend to win out over a collaborate one, because the competitive person wants to win. 

Psychology
1.) Attraction. Women who want to be nurturing mothers are attracted to men who want to and are capable of providing for an protecting their families. This means that the family decision as to who goes out to work and who earns the money is likely to be compounded by both parents: both the mother and the father want the mother to fulfill the key nurturing role and the father to fulfill the key bread winning role. The other side of this coin is that women are aware that they are more likely to be attractive to men if they behave in a traditionally feminine way and so this behaviour is rewarded.
2.) Confidence. Men tend to have more confidence in their abilities than women. We tend to have confidence in people who are confident about themselves. So men find it easier to convince employers, voters, customers and interviewers of their abilities. 
3.) Masculinity has higher status. Things associated with men tend to have a higher status than things associated with women. There is far more talk about wanting women to access the opportunities that men have, than the other way round: society seems to think it's more problematic that women aren't CEOs than that men don't get to be stay-at-home dads. This is because traditionally masculine roles have higher status than traditionally feminine ones. This can be quite clearly seen in children, where girls are often seen wearing blue trousers and playing with cars, but boys are rarely seen wearing pink dresses and playing with dolls. In adult life too, men are assumed to be more capable than women - women need to be better than men to be judged as equal. 
4) Similarity bias. We tend to feel comfortable surrounded by people like us. This means that girls who are interested in computer coding might not study it because they might fear that they will be massively outnumbered by boys, and that stay at home dads are likely to feel less comfortable at the school gates. It also means that employers in male dominated fields are less likely to want to employ women.

Experience
1.) Social circles. Your first and most powerful careers education comes from those you see around you. The jobs you can see within your social circle have a significant impact on your understanding of what jobs there are, and what kind of people do them. 
2.) Role models. If you can't see 'women like you' in particular roles, it is difficult to imagine that you could make it, and it's hard to work out the best path. Role models can be real people or fictional characters. 
3.) Structures. Many of the systems within our society have been developed either by men, or to suit men. This can make them less attractive to women and can lead women to believe that they would be unlikely to find success in these fields. Our adversarial system of the Houses of Parliament is one example of a structure that is very masculine. It plays to the strengths of the competitive and combative of many men and there seems to be no obvious place for the more typically cooperative and collaborative female approach. Women listening to Prime Minister's Questions from Parliament might well feel that they would not fit in and could not succeed in this kind of environment. Job applications highlight the importance of confidence, as jobs are more likely to be given to candidates who present confident versions of themselves, and this is more likely to be seen in men than women. Women therefore see time and time again that men are more likely to succeed, and this inevitably and erroneously erodes their belief in their own abilities. 

These factors combine to lead to a number of different outcomes:

1) Individual choices: society has moved on to allowing women access to almost anything they want to go for, but women choose not to take advantage of the opportunities available. This is because: i) they want to be nurturing mothers and it's hard to combine this with being a successful worker; ii) they want to be likeable and attractive and it's hard to be a successful women if you are likeable and attractive  iii) they find that they lack the competitive edge which could get them to the top iv) their partners are in demanding jobs and someone needs to be able to drop the kids at school v) they don't like feeling out of place in a masculine environment, vi) their husbands' do actually have greater earning potential than they do, so it makes economic sense for the family to support his career and vii) they don't believe they can make it. 

2) Discrimination: If women decide to pursue their careers, they then are met with barriers all along the way. These barriers are often unconscious, so can be very difficult to combat. Barriers include that i) women sound less confident about themselves, so are assumed to be less competent; ii) women are likely to be judged as either competent or likeable - not both, and people are generally looking for a recruit who is both competent and likeable ; iii) employers assume that women will leave to have children and come back less committed to their work; iv) employers assume that part timer workers and mothers are less committed to their work than full timers and fathers; v) women are generally judged to be inferior to men; vi) women can't see many other women succeeding in some arenas which means that it is more difficult for them to imagine succeeding and don't have a template for how it's done.

I've tried to express this in the most simplistic, straightforward way, and the picture still looks incredibly complicated. And this is why it's proving so hard to solve. The challenges are biological and unconscious and centre on our identities and these are three tough cookies to crack. The messages we get are consistent, pervasive and they come at us from the moment we are born. I'm sure there are solutions, but I might save them for another post. 

Does coaching actually work?

I'm giving a lecture about this next week, and thought I should try to get this clear in my own mind first, so I've done a bit of a trawl through the recent literature about the topic to see what we know.

First of all, it was interesting to note that coaching is definitely on the increase. The industry is growing, the number of clients who are being coached is on the up, and the fees that coaches are charging seems to be increasing too. But the evidence base for whether or not, and how coaching works, is lagging behind a bit.

The effectiveness of coaching is a hard thing to measure. It's hard to work out what you should be measuring - whether that is the degree to which an individual has met their own goals, behavioural change, increased productivity, or work engagement. Perhaps we should be going beyond the individual to examine the impact on the organisation - asking a coachee's team whether they are feeling any effects of their manager's coaching, or looking at the organisation's overall profitability. Then even if you are clear about what you are looking to measure, it is not always easy to be sure that it's the coaching which has made the difference. Performance, attitude and productivity are influenced by all sorts of different factors, so it's hard to feel confident that coaching has made the difference. Finally, the nature of coaching will vary tremendously. Coaches vary in their style and their competence, they drawn on different theoretical models, and they are likely to get on better with some clients than others. Then there is the challenge, associated with much academic publishing, that studies which find a positive outcome are far more likely to get published than those which don't, so even if we can see positive effects of coaching reported in the literature, that may not be the whole story.

But despite these challenges, there has been some decent research which explores the issues.

A number of small scale studies have found positive links between coaching and goal accomplishment (Fischer & Beimer, 2009), professional growth (McGriffin & Obonya, 2010), professional relationships (Kombarakaran et al., 2005), managerial flexibility (Jones, Rafferty & Griffin, 2006), productivity (Olivero, Bane & Kopelma, 1997) and resilience and workplace well-being (Grant et al., 2010).

On the back of these kinds of small scale studies, two larger meta-analyses have been conducted. 

Theeboom, Beerma and van Vianen (2014) looked at all different kinds of coaching (executive, life and health) and examined specifically the impact on the individual. They found that coaching overall had a significant positive impact on clients, and specifically helped with skill development, well-being, their ability to cope and attitudes to work. They found no link between outcomes and number of sessions, although offered the plausible explanation that people facing more complex challenges were more likely to end up having longer coaching relationships.

Jones, Woods and Guillaume (2016) conducted another meta-analysis of studies which had been conducted into executive, or workplace training and found some encouraging findings. They found that coaching has a positive impact overall on organisation outcomes, and at the individual level, people benefited from coaching in terms of their skill development, their attitude towards work and they achieved better results. They also found that internal coaches (not line managers) were a little more effective than external ones, but there was no discernible difference between face to face and blended (ie face to face plus online) coaching and that (echoing Theeboom et al.'s findings) the number of coaching sessions didn't seem to matter either.

Drilling down to examine how exactly coaching works, the spotlight definitely seems to come to rest on the working alliance - or the relationship between the coach and the coachee. This echoes what decades of research into psychotherapy have found, which is that the specific approach the practitioner chooses to take doesn't seem to matter much; what matters instead is what they call the common factors which basically seems to boil down to a positive relationship, trust, an unconditional positive regard. One of the biggest studies which explores this in coaching, was conducted by de Haan and his colleagues in 2016, and explored the links between perceptions of the coaching relationship and coaching effectiveness. The authors looked at nearly 2000 client-coach pairs, and found that the client's perception of the relationship was closely linked to their perception of coaching effectiveness, particularly so when the working alliance was focused on goals and tasks. They also identified that a good working alliance enhanced the client's self-efficacy, and this increased confidence led to more effective outcomes.



References

de Haan, E., Grant, A. M., Burger, Y., & Eriksson, P. O. (2016). A large-scale study of executive and workplace coaching: The relative contributions of relationship, personality match, and self-efficacy. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 68(3), 189.

De Meuse, K. P., Dai, G., & Lee, R. J. (2009). Evaluating the effectiveness of executive coaching: Beyond ROI?. Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, 2(2), 117-134.

Fischer, R. L., & Beimers, D. (2009). “Put me in, Coach”: A pilot evaluation of executive coaching in the nonprofit sector. Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 19(4), 507-522.

Grover, S., & Furnham, A. (2016). Coaching as a developmental intervention in organisations: A systematic review of its effectiveness and the mechanisms underlying it. PloS one, 11(7), e0159137.

Kombarakaran, F. A., Yang, J. A., Baker, M. N., & Fernandes, P. B. (2008). Executive coaching: it works!. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 60(1), 78.

Jones, R. A., Rafferty, A. E., & Griffin, M. A. (2006). The executive coaching trend: Towards more flexible executives. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 27(7), 584-596.

Jones, R. J., Woods, S. A., & Guillaume, Y. R. (2016). The effectiveness of workplace coaching: A meta‐analysis of learning and performance outcomes from coaching. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 89(2), 249-277.

Olivero, G., Bane, K. D., & Kopelman, R. E. (1997). Executive coaching as a transfer of training tool: Effects on productivity in a public agency. Public personnel management, 26(4), 461-469.

Theeboom, T., Beersma, B., & van Vianen, A. E. (2014). Does coaching work? A meta-analysis on the effects of coaching on individual level outcomes in an organizational context. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 9(1), 1-18.

Je ne regrette rien

One of my students, Leesha, last year, conducted a qualitative study into how career changers have made sense of their career paths, and one thing she found was that the participants had no career regrets. They all made choices which didn't turn out so well, but none of them would say that they regretted their choices.

I have been thinking about this, and I wondered what literature there was, out there, which explored this idea of career regrets.

First of all, what do we actually mean by 'regret'?

Regret is a decision making emotion. It’s experienced when you realise that your current situation would now be better had you made a different choice (Landman,1993). It's a backwards looking emotion and signals that you believe you made a poor choice, but it also has links to forward looking emotions in that is has a role in determining future action and directing motivation. The research in this field has been applied to a range of different fields, including organisational behaviour (Maitlis & Ozcelik, 2004) but not really to career choice, despite the fact that career and education choices has been shown to be one of the things that people most regret in life. 

Specific definitions of regret are tricky: ‘The conceptual edges of regret are not sharp’ (Ovid and Gilovich p. 382). In general it is defined as the combination of an emotion and a judgement about a choice you made in the past, which led to your current life being worse that it could have been had you made a different choice. It is not thought to be something that you would do differently if you had your time again, although is often described in this way in the literature. It seems that we don't necessarily think that regrets are a bad thing, with evidence suggesting that we believe that regrets help to motivate us to strive for things we want, help us to better understand ourselves and our past and help to preserve harmonious relationships (Saffrey, Summerville & Roese, 2008).

What kinds of things do we regret?

You can, of course, regret things that you do (regret action) and regret things that you don't do (regret inaction). It seems that it takes us longer to get over an inaction regret than an action regret (so, for example, we recover from taking the wrong job more quickly than we recover from not taking the right job). But action regrets are more intense than inaction regrets. in general, if we can justify the decision we took, the regret is less.

Roese and Summerville (2005) also examined and concluded that opportunity breeds regret. If there is always a chance to go back and do something different, or do a new course, you are more likely to feel regret because you aren’t going to resolve dissonance so completely. Alternatively, if there is clearly no chance that you can fix things, you are more likely to make your peace with your situation more quickly, and the regret dissipates more quickly.  

How do we get over it?

There are two ways that we try to reduce the pain of regret. First there is action. We can put a new plan in to action which changes things. This is more likely to happen after a regrettable action than a regrettable inaction. Second, we can do something called psycholgical repair, which describes the process of chainging the way we think about the issue, and so reducing the regret we feel. We do this in two ways. We identify a silver lining (the job was clearly the wrong choice, but at least I got some experience of project management) or we do something called dissonance reduction, in which we convince ourselves that our current situation is better than we thought (I didn't really want that job anyway). This is explained by the theory of regret (Zeelenberg & Pieters, 2007).

But what about career regrets specifically?

There isn't very much written about career regrets as such even though it's clear that career regrets play heavily on a lot of people's minds.

Roese and Summerville (2005) in a meta-analysis of 11 regret ranking studies show that people regret (in order) educational, career, romance, parenting, self and leisure choices. Education accounts for 32% of all the reported regrets, career 22%. Morrison and Roese (2011) also found that career was one of the most common regrets (although this time ranking just below romance).

Career regrets associated with behaviour aimed at increasing objective success (promotion and pay) and with subjective success (choosing a values-driven career, or re-training). Sullivan and colleagues (2007) found that people who had been made redundant regretted not having played politics, and not having made more family-oriented career choices.

Santra and Giri (2017) found that IT professionals in India all had career regrets.They regretted things they did, things they didn't do, their career choices and their levels of career success, but inexplicably, their career regrets were positively correlated with job satisfaction: the more regrets they had, the happier they were at work.

I think there is more work to be done here. Why did Leesha's participants not regret their choices? They said that it was because even though they had made bad decisions, the decisions they made had led them to their current, positive position. So that might indicate that regret is linked with current levels of satisfaction. But that's not the findings from Santra and Giri's study. Those authors suggested that their surprising result might be explained by their cultural position, so perhaps another survey with UK participants could be valuable?

I'd be interested to explore the links between career regrets and current levels of satisfaction, and to see whether people regretted lack of subjective or objective success, and maybe whether or not there are explanations in the number of career changes people have had: their opportunities for course correction.

  

References

Morrison, M., & Roese, N. J. (2011). Regrets of the typical American: Findings from a nationally representative sample. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2(6), 576-583.

Roese, N. J., & Summerville, A. (2005). What we regret most... and why. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31(9), 1273-1285. 

Saffrey, C., Summerville, A., & Roese, N. J. (2008). Praise for regret: People value regret above other negative emotions. Motivation and emotion, 32(1), 46-54.

Santra, S., & Giri, V. N. (2017). IMPACT OF CAREER REGRET ON CAREER OUTCOMES OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (IT) PROFESSIONALS IN INDIA. ASBBS Proceedings, 24(1), 481. 

Sullivan, S. E., Forret, M. L., & Mainiero, L. A. (2007). No regrets? An investigation of the relationship between being laid off and experiencing career regrets. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 22(8), 787-804.

Goerke, Moller, & Schulz-Hardt, 2004; Maitlis & Ozcelik, 2004

What factors do people actually base their career decisions on?

I've been doing a bit of digging around to find out what empirical evidence there is about the factors on which people base their career choices. 

There is quite a bit published on this topic, which I've sumarised below, but it's notable that pretty much every study gets its data by asking people what factors influenced their choices. This I think is problematic because it assumes a rational model of career decision making, in which people are fully aware of the basis of their choice. Decision making research, however, suggests otherwise, demonstrating time and again that people are not aware of the reasons for their choices.This indicates that we need to be very clear that the career research only tells us about the factors that people believe influenced their choices, rather than the information which actually did.

A further, although I think much less significant problem with the existing literature, is that much of the literature uses students studying vocational courses as participants - finding out why engineering students decided to choose engineering. You can see that the choice to study engineering might be linked to the choice to pursue engineering as a career, but the two are not the same.

That said, it is still quite interesting to understand that the factors that people think they base their decisions on, and the research gives a fairly broad account of this.

Rousseau and Venter (2009) summarise the research in a framework which highlights that there are three types of factors that are reported. First there are individual factors, which generally focus on career related interests, personality and skills. Second are environmental factors which are quite pragmatic and include the number of job opportunitites there are, the requirements of the job and the chances of professional development or promotion. The final group of factors are described as situational and these include things such as the educational level of the individual, and the influence of their family and friends.

There is empirical evidence that these factors are all perceived to have an influence on job choice, but they are not all equally prevalent in the literature. Abrahams et al. (2015) review the literature and found that the most prominent were family, academic potential, job opportunities, and socio cultural factors. In another review,
de Magalhaes and Wilde, 2015 concluded that money, job availability, job security and opportunities for advancement were the most important factors.

Paolillo and Estes (1982) asked engineers, accountants, doctors and lawyers to rate how important the following factors were to their job choice:

Earning potential
Association with people in that profesion
Parental influence
Cost of education
Social status attainment
Job satisfaction
Years of education required
Aptitude for subject
Teacher influence
Peer influence
Previous work experience
Availability of employment

Astonishly, they found that the two LEAST influential factors were job satisfaction and aptidude. This suggests that their participants felt that they were far more influenced by advice from others (parents, teachers and peers), the opportunities which came their way (previous experience and contacts) pragmatic factors (cost and time of training and availability) and extrinsic rewards (social status and earning potential).

Other more recent students support these relative weightings. Advice from others was shown by Chope, 2005; Dick and Rallis, 1991; Ferry, 2006; Jawirtz, & Case, 1998; Myburgh, 2005; potential for development  was shown by Abrahams et al., 2015 and Rousseau & Venter, 2009; and extrinsic rewards by Abrahams et al., 2015; Jawirtz, & Case, 1998 and Lanthan, Ostrowski & Pavlock, 1987. A few other factors have shown up occasionally. Instrinsic aspects of the job were shown by Mashige and Oduntan, 2011 and Palmer, Burket & Aubusson,2017, who identified values as important, skills were rated as important in a number of studies (Jawirtz, & Case, 1998; Rousseau and Venter, 2009) and Stephen and Makotose, 2007, found that their engineer participants were intrinsically motivated by their interest in the topic. Finally, Jawirtz & Case found that participants were influenced by their perceptions of the social identities of the occupation they were considering. 

Overall then, the literature suggests that people don't think their job choices are very influenced by their belief that they will enjoy or be good at the job. Instead, they are far more influenced by their belief in their ability to get the job, the views of their family and friends and their perceptions of their chances of objective career success (money and promotions).

References
Abrahams, F., Jano, R., & van Lill, B. (2015). Factors influencing the career choice of undergraduate students at a historically disadvantaged South African university. Industry and Higher Education, 29(3), 209-219.

Chope, R. C. (2005). Qualitatively assessing family influence in career decision making. Journal of Career Assessment, 13(4), 395-414.

Dick, T. P., & Rallis, S. F. (1991). Factors and influences on high school students' career choices. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 281-292.

de Magalhaes, J. R. A., & Wilde, H. (2015). An exploratory study of the career drivers of accounting students. Journal of Business & Economics Research (Online), 13(4), 155. 

Geiger, M. A., & Ogilby, S. M. (2000). The first course in accounting: students’ perceptions and their effect on the decision to major in accounting. Journal of Accounting Education, 18(2), 63-78.

Hackman, J. R., & Oldham, G. R. (1976). Motivation through the design of work: Test of a theory. Organizational behavior and human performance, 16(2), 250-279.

Humphrey, S. E., Nahrgang, J. D., & Morgeson, F. P. (2007). Integrating motivational, social, and contextual work design features: a meta-analytic summary and theoretical extension of the work design literature. The Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(5), 1332 - 1356.

Jawirtz, J., & Case, J. (1998). Exploring the reasons South African students give for studying engineering. International Journal of Engineering Education, 14(4), 235-240. 

Mashige, K. P., & Oduntan, O. A. (2011). Factors influencing South African optometry students in choosing their career and institution of learning. African Vision and Eye Health, 70(1), 21-28.

Paolillo, J. G., & Estes, R. W. (1982). An Empirical Analysis of Career Choice Factors Among Accountants, Attorneys, Engineers, and Physicians. THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW, 57(4).

Palmer, T. A., Burke, P. F., & Aubusson, P. (2017). Why school students choose and reject science: a study of the factors that students consider when selecting subjects. International Journal of Science Education, 39(6), 645-662.

Rousseau, G. G., & Venter, D. J. (2009). Investigating the importance of factors related to career choice. Management Dynamics: Journal of the Southern African Institute for Management Scientists, 18(3), 2-14.