Whilst I'm reading a bit about female leaders, I thought it would be useful to have a reminder of the empirical evidence around this area.
There has genuinely been a lot of good work done and a lot of progress made towards a more equitable work place, and women are now participating in employment and being promoted up to middle management to unprecedented levels. But at senior levels, progress has been slow, hasn't gone far enough, and seems to have stopped. Women make up 22% of parliamentarians, 18% of SME CEOs in the UK, 17% of Fortune 500 corporate board members (mostly in HR and marketing functions) and only 5.2% of CEOs in the US.
So what's going on?
First, there's quite a lot of evidence that women make equally good, just different, leaders from men.
Female leaders do seem to lead in different ways from their male counterparts. Women are more likely to favour a collaborative and participatory approach to leadership which is less hierarchical that that which tends to be adopted by men. But these differences don't appear to be detrimental to the organisations. Women leaders are associated with greater innovation and profitability, broader consumer outreach and better CSR records. It's also been shown that having women at the top makes it more likely that there will be opportunities for women lower down the ranks.
So, women are just as good in senior positions, and yet are not getting the top jobs. The reasons for this are inevitably complex. First there is some good old basic sexism. Women are just not perceived to be capable and competent as leaders. Women need to outperform men to be rated as equal. And this is compounded by something the researchers call 'homosocial reporduction' which is the notion that people tend to want to recruit people who are just like them: if the senior leaders are all men, they will unconsciously favour men when recruiting other senior leaders.
On top of these biases in recruitment, there is also the issue that women don't get the same access to opportunities during the early part of their careers. Men are more likely to be given mentors, and those mentors are more likely to be people who can actually influence on behalf of their mentees. Men are also more likely to get access to strong professional networks, social ties to elites, workplace support and insider information, all of which can make a big difference to chances of promotion.
There is also something called 'role incongruity' which really strikes a chord with me, and which both puts women off going for the top jobs and makes others judge their leadership ability more negatively. Corporate leadership positions are gendered: leaders are conceptualised as masculine (remember Schein's Think Manager Think Male study which demonstrated that people are likely to see the characteristics they associate with good management as masculine character traits). For a man, there is no conflict between the role he is supposed to play in society, and role he is supposed to play in leadership: boosting his masculinity will boost his chances of being perceived as a good leader.
For a woman, there is a mismatch between the social roles she is expected to fulfil and the role of a leader. A woman has to make a choice between fulfilling her social role (ie behaving in a feminine way) and fulfilling the role of a leader (ie behaving in a masculine way). She needs to choose between being socially desirable and being successful in the workplace. As well as being a tough choice for any woman who wants to be respected and liked both in society and in work, this phenomenon seems to lead to women being more negatively rated for behaving as leaders: women are given negative ratings for dominating conversations and for engaging in self-promotion where men are given positive ratings for it.
Finally, women leaders are set up to fail. They are more likely to be recruited to precarious management positions (this is the Glass Cliff I've posted about before), they are not given access to the financial resources needed to make the changes they want, and they get less support from their peers.
To sum up: women are not given the opportunities to develop their leadership skills, people recruiting them assume they're not going to be very good, and if they do make it through all of that, they're set up to fail, they are not given the credit they deserve for their achievements and they are not thought to be very likeable.
Grrrr.
Glass, C. and Cook, A. (2016) Leading at the top: understanding women's challenges above the glass ceiling The Leadership Quarterly 27 51 - 63
Monday 25 January 2016
Saturday 23 January 2016
Female CEOs and the glass cliff
We've all come across the concept of the glass ceiling. It's a metaphor to describe the way that women often can't seem to get promoted up the career ladder beyond a certain point, even though official policies may be in place to encourage equality. There have been some changes in this over the last couple of decades, and the glass ceiling is now positioned considerably higher than it once was, but there are still particular challenges which women face when aiming for the top jobs, and progress towards equality seems to have slowed down in the last five years or so.
The reasons are complex, but one line of research from Michelle Ryan and Kim Peters sheds some light on it.
Ryan and Peters have coined the term the 'glass cliff' which describes a particular phenomenon which senior women can face in the board room. Their research was sparked off by an article in The Times a decade or so ago which showed that the share price of an organisation was likely to fall immediately after a women was appointed to the role of a CEO. The Times reported this as an indication that women CEOs caused poor performance, but Ryan and Peters looked more closely at the data and found alternative explanations.
First they found that although share prices went down after female CEOs were appointed, there was no evidence that performance decreased. Share prices are a measure of confidence, and it seems that although female CEOs were no worse (and indeed no better) than their male counterparts at actually managing the performance of their organisations, the shareholder-buying public imagined that the appointment of a new female CEO would cause company performance to dip. They sold their shares and the prices went down.
The second interesting thing Ryan and Peters did (and this is where the glass cliff comes in) was to look at the direction of travel of share prices before the appointment of new CEOs. They found that female CEOs were more likely to be appointed to organisations whose share prices were already falling: women were appointed as CEOs to failing companies. This of course means that the female CEOs had an uphill struggle in trying to make their organisations successful, and were more likely to fail.
This, you can well imagine, does nothing for these women's careers, or for more diverse board rooms. Leaders, particularly non-prototypical leaders, tend to be blamed for organisational failures, and leaders of failing organisations have a harder time getting new jobs, both of which will contribute to the stagnation in the progress towards equality in the board room.
The research seems to suggest that there are a number of reasons for the over-recruitment of women leaders in struggling organisations. First, in times of crisis we are more likely to take risks (in a last ditch attempt to save the organisation, we'll try anything to save the firm - even appointing a woman!). Then it is thought that women's typical leadership skillset might be particularly suited to dealing with organisations in crisis. Finally, the men who might trump women in leadership selection processes in other circumstances are less likely to apply for senior positions in failing firms - the jobs don't look secure so they don't go for them, leaving the field clear for women.
This glass cliff effect has been seen in a range of other arenas in the private and public sectors, and in politics: one study of Tory MPs showed that whilst female MPs tended to have secured fewer votes than male MPs, this was entirely explained by the fact that they were put forward in seats which were less safe. The same effect has been shown with candidates from BME backgrounds: a study in the US found that black basketball coaches were more likely to be appointed to failing teams.
One other somewhat dispiriting piece of research explored how members of the public explained the glass cliff phenomenon when presented with the evidence. Women were more likely to accept its existence and to think that it is a result of fundamental unfairness in the work place and in society more broadly. Men were more likely to deny it's existence, or explain it away on the grounds that women just aren't as suited to difficult leadership challenges.
Ryan, M.K., Haslam, S.A., Morgenroth, T., Rink, F., Stoker, J. and Peters, K. (in press) Getting on top of the glass cliff: Revieing a decade of evidence, explanations and impact The Leadership Quarterly
The reasons are complex, but one line of research from Michelle Ryan and Kim Peters sheds some light on it.
Ryan and Peters have coined the term the 'glass cliff' which describes a particular phenomenon which senior women can face in the board room. Their research was sparked off by an article in The Times a decade or so ago which showed that the share price of an organisation was likely to fall immediately after a women was appointed to the role of a CEO. The Times reported this as an indication that women CEOs caused poor performance, but Ryan and Peters looked more closely at the data and found alternative explanations.
First they found that although share prices went down after female CEOs were appointed, there was no evidence that performance decreased. Share prices are a measure of confidence, and it seems that although female CEOs were no worse (and indeed no better) than their male counterparts at actually managing the performance of their organisations, the shareholder-buying public imagined that the appointment of a new female CEO would cause company performance to dip. They sold their shares and the prices went down.
The second interesting thing Ryan and Peters did (and this is where the glass cliff comes in) was to look at the direction of travel of share prices before the appointment of new CEOs. They found that female CEOs were more likely to be appointed to organisations whose share prices were already falling: women were appointed as CEOs to failing companies. This of course means that the female CEOs had an uphill struggle in trying to make their organisations successful, and were more likely to fail.
This, you can well imagine, does nothing for these women's careers, or for more diverse board rooms. Leaders, particularly non-prototypical leaders, tend to be blamed for organisational failures, and leaders of failing organisations have a harder time getting new jobs, both of which will contribute to the stagnation in the progress towards equality in the board room.
The research seems to suggest that there are a number of reasons for the over-recruitment of women leaders in struggling organisations. First, in times of crisis we are more likely to take risks (in a last ditch attempt to save the organisation, we'll try anything to save the firm - even appointing a woman!). Then it is thought that women's typical leadership skillset might be particularly suited to dealing with organisations in crisis. Finally, the men who might trump women in leadership selection processes in other circumstances are less likely to apply for senior positions in failing firms - the jobs don't look secure so they don't go for them, leaving the field clear for women.
This glass cliff effect has been seen in a range of other arenas in the private and public sectors, and in politics: one study of Tory MPs showed that whilst female MPs tended to have secured fewer votes than male MPs, this was entirely explained by the fact that they were put forward in seats which were less safe. The same effect has been shown with candidates from BME backgrounds: a study in the US found that black basketball coaches were more likely to be appointed to failing teams.
One other somewhat dispiriting piece of research explored how members of the public explained the glass cliff phenomenon when presented with the evidence. Women were more likely to accept its existence and to think that it is a result of fundamental unfairness in the work place and in society more broadly. Men were more likely to deny it's existence, or explain it away on the grounds that women just aren't as suited to difficult leadership challenges.
Ryan, M.K., Haslam, S.A., Morgenroth, T., Rink, F., Stoker, J. and Peters, K. (in press) Getting on top of the glass cliff: Revieing a decade of evidence, explanations and impact The Leadership Quarterly
Sunday 17 January 2016
How to work out what matters to you in a career using Kelly's construct theory
Kelly's construct theory is one of my favourites. Kelly was a psychologist who published his theory in the 1950s. His theory is a constructivist one and fits in well with the current thinking in career development. The starting point is that each of us 'construes' the world in our own particular way. We can't possibly pay attention to everything and we don't all value things in the same way, so we each have our own set of filters which enables us to focus (notice and analyse) only on the aspects about the world which matter to us. These Kelly describes as your personal constructs. This on its own doesn't sound particularly ground breaking (although I don't mean to do him down - it was probably quite innovative in the 1950s!), but Kelly has a couple of other things which I think are really useful. The first is that Kelly suggests that to really understand what you mean by a particular construct, you need to conceptualise it as a bi-polar construct - you need to identify its opposite. Take the example of 'friend': for one person, the other end of the scale could be 'acquaintance', and for another, it could be 'enemy'.
The second thing that Kelly brings is his technique for identifying what your particular constructs are, which he does through something called the Repertory Grid. The Rep Grid can be used to identify your personal constructs in any element of your life - you could use it to identify what matters to you in friendships, in holidays, in yourself, but in a career context, it can be used to get clients to think about how they conceptualise the world of work, and what matters to them in a job.
I had a go at using it to identify what I want from a job, and I'll share it here as an illustration.
First you need to identify some 'elements'. Here I have used a handful of the jobs I have had in my life, but it might be even more useful to get your clients to think of a broader range of jobs - perhaps those which their friends and family do, or just ten or so which spring to mind. Then, placing it on a grid, so that you can keep track of things, you need to take three of them (any three in any order) and identify a quality which two of the jobs share and one does not. Having identified this, you need to put a name to the opposite of that. Keep doing this with different triads of jobs, until either you run out of triads, or you find you keep coming up with the same constructs. This will then give you a list of your personal work constructs.
Here's what mine look like:
So, you can see that I've used seven of the jobs I've had (Lecturer, Head of Careers Service, Retail Manager etc) and then taking three at a time I've identified a quality which two of the roles shared and one didn't. So in the first line, I've compared lecturer with head of careers service and retail manager, and identified that I experienced two of these as interesting jobs, and one as a dull job.
This has then given me an interesting list of my personal work-constructs, suggesting that when I look at a job (any job) I analyse it in terms of these qualities. It's not quite that these are important to me, it's more that this is just the way that world is for me.
If a client ended up with a list such as this, it might be a useful place to start a conversation which genuinely means something to them.
There is one final element which Kelly suggests which could help, and this is something he calls 'laddering'. This is a technique which focuses their thinking even further and aims to get at some higher-order constructs. Here you ask your client why each of the constructs is important to them, and then again, get them to describe the opposite. For me this didn't work very well with interesting / dull because it's an end in itself, but when I asked myself why I liked the idea of a role which is core rather than peripheral, I was able to identify that it makes me feel it's more meaningful.
Fransella, F. and Dalton, P. (2000) Personal Construct Counselling in Action London: Sage
Kelly, G.A. (1955/1991) The Psychology of Personal Constructs New York: Norton. Reprinted by Routledge, London 1991
The second thing that Kelly brings is his technique for identifying what your particular constructs are, which he does through something called the Repertory Grid. The Rep Grid can be used to identify your personal constructs in any element of your life - you could use it to identify what matters to you in friendships, in holidays, in yourself, but in a career context, it can be used to get clients to think about how they conceptualise the world of work, and what matters to them in a job.
I had a go at using it to identify what I want from a job, and I'll share it here as an illustration.
First you need to identify some 'elements'. Here I have used a handful of the jobs I have had in my life, but it might be even more useful to get your clients to think of a broader range of jobs - perhaps those which their friends and family do, or just ten or so which spring to mind. Then, placing it on a grid, so that you can keep track of things, you need to take three of them (any three in any order) and identify a quality which two of the jobs share and one does not. Having identified this, you need to put a name to the opposite of that. Keep doing this with different triads of jobs, until either you run out of triads, or you find you keep coming up with the same constructs. This will then give you a list of your personal work constructs.
Here's what mine look like:
|
|
Lecturer
|
Head of Careers Service
|
Retail manager
|
Careers Adviser in HE
|
Receptionist
|
Typist
|
Filing Clerk
|
|
|
Interesting
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
|
|
|
|
Dull
|
|
Core
|
|
|
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
|
Peripheral
|
|
Meaningful
|
X
|
|
X
|
|
|
|
X
|
Meaningless
|
|
Influential
|
|
X
|
|
X
|
X
|
|
|
Not influential
|
|
Sociable
|
|
|
X
|
|
|
X
|
X
|
Isolated
|
|
Intellectual status
|
X
|
|
|
X
|
|
|
X
|
No intellectual status
|
|
Long term strategy
|
|
X
|
|
|
X
|
X
|
|
Immediate
|
So, you can see that I've used seven of the jobs I've had (Lecturer, Head of Careers Service, Retail Manager etc) and then taking three at a time I've identified a quality which two of the roles shared and one didn't. So in the first line, I've compared lecturer with head of careers service and retail manager, and identified that I experienced two of these as interesting jobs, and one as a dull job.
This has then given me an interesting list of my personal work-constructs, suggesting that when I look at a job (any job) I analyse it in terms of these qualities. It's not quite that these are important to me, it's more that this is just the way that world is for me.
If a client ended up with a list such as this, it might be a useful place to start a conversation which genuinely means something to them.
There is one final element which Kelly suggests which could help, and this is something he calls 'laddering'. This is a technique which focuses their thinking even further and aims to get at some higher-order constructs. Here you ask your client why each of the constructs is important to them, and then again, get them to describe the opposite. For me this didn't work very well with interesting / dull because it's an end in itself, but when I asked myself why I liked the idea of a role which is core rather than peripheral, I was able to identify that it makes me feel it's more meaningful.
Fransella, F. and Dalton, P. (2000) Personal Construct Counselling in Action London: Sage
Kelly, G.A. (1955/1991) The Psychology of Personal Constructs New York: Norton. Reprinted by Routledge, London 1991
Friday 15 January 2016
Meaningful work: what it is and how can we help our clients to identify it?
Meaningful work is something which has been written about a fair amount in the literature but it's always been a bit piecemeal. It's a topic of interest to organisational and business psychologists, positive psychologists and of course career development theorists, but these academic arenas haven't really paid much attention to each other, resulting in an evidence base which is patchy and confusing.
This paper "Purpose and meaning in career development applications" starts to plug the gap, providing a good summary of the relevant literature and giving some examples of practical exercises that career practitioners can use with their clients.
The authors identify six different areas that are deemed worthy of our consideration: strengths, positive emotions and flow, gratitude, work hope, job crafting and calling.
Overall the evidence between career well-being and life well-being is strong and the research indicates that people, these days, are looking for work which matters in a deeper and more existential way, developing their potential and making a contribution to the common good.
But what do we know about what factors lead to a more meaningful career, and how can we as practitioners help our clients to achieve this?
1. Strengths.
According to strengths theory our strengths carry intrinsic meaning, so simply using our strengths brings meaning to our lives. Evidence shows that using our strengths on a daily basis increases the levels of meaning in our lives and using them at work increases meaning at work and job satisfaction. Two classifications of strengths are recommended for our work with clients: the Values in Action strengths finder and Clifton's Strengths finder. These can be great tools to help your clients identify their strengths and this can lead to valuable discussions.
2. Positive emotions and flow
When people feel better at work they are more fulfilled and they work more effectively. Positive emotions have been shown to link with creative problem solving, helping behaviours and job satisfaction. We can help our clients to experience more positive emotions at work by getting them to think of ways in which they can seek out or create situations which are likely to make them feel good. One way to do this is to try and get them to think about the situations in which they experience 'flow'.
Flow is that feeling you get when you are so absorbed in a task that you're not aware of time passing and don't notice anything going on around you. It can enhance mood, boost self-esteem and give you a sense of purpose. Flow tends to happen when people are engaged with something they are good at but find hard. If we can get clients to identify times when they experience flow at work, we could then work with them to think about how they could get themselves in to those situations more frequently.
3. Gratitude
Being thankful and giving thanks for what you've got has been linked to greater well-being. It has been shown to stir up positive emotions, allows us to focus on our blessings, and creates an expectation and a confidence that good things will come to us. There is a little bit of evidence too that these positive outcomes apply to work-related gratitude. The authors therefore suggest that we should encourage our clients to count their work blessings and maybe even engage in thanking some of their colleagues for what they have brought to their working lives.
4. Work hope
Hope in an academic context means something much more specific than its definition in everyday conversation. In psychological terms it has three elements: a goal, a pathway to a goal and agency. So it's knowing where you want to get to, knowing how to get there, and believing that you can do it. Having hope is linked to increased self-esteem, making self-directed career decisions and is so closely associated with having meaningful work that some academics claim that it is in fact a core element of meaningful work, rather than a separate construct. Working with clients on identifying goals and breaking these down in to numerous sub-goals has been shown to help foster hope.
5. Job crafting
This is one which has been around for a while in career development theories but is new to positive psychology. It makes explicit the idea that we have some control over our jobs and can shape them to better meet our needs. Workers can engage in task, relational and cognitive crafting. This process results in individuals changing their daily work to involve more tasks which better suit them, spending time with people they work well with, and thinking about their work more positively. It has been shown to link with performance, satisfaction and commitment, so everyone is a winner!
6. Calling
Again, not a new one for many career practitioners. As sense of calling is when someone feels destined to fulfil a particular role which fits with their broader life purpose and has a connection with something pro-social. Links have been found in the research between having a calling and life wellbeing, job satisfaction and meaning at work. Conversations with clients which encourage them to think about the three key elements (what they were born to do, what do think matters in life, and what could they contribute to the greater good) can spark off ideas in clients who may not have identified their calling.
This paper "Purpose and meaning in career development applications" starts to plug the gap, providing a good summary of the relevant literature and giving some examples of practical exercises that career practitioners can use with their clients.
The authors identify six different areas that are deemed worthy of our consideration: strengths, positive emotions and flow, gratitude, work hope, job crafting and calling.
Overall the evidence between career well-being and life well-being is strong and the research indicates that people, these days, are looking for work which matters in a deeper and more existential way, developing their potential and making a contribution to the common good.
But what do we know about what factors lead to a more meaningful career, and how can we as practitioners help our clients to achieve this?
1. Strengths.
According to strengths theory our strengths carry intrinsic meaning, so simply using our strengths brings meaning to our lives. Evidence shows that using our strengths on a daily basis increases the levels of meaning in our lives and using them at work increases meaning at work and job satisfaction. Two classifications of strengths are recommended for our work with clients: the Values in Action strengths finder and Clifton's Strengths finder. These can be great tools to help your clients identify their strengths and this can lead to valuable discussions.
2. Positive emotions and flow
When people feel better at work they are more fulfilled and they work more effectively. Positive emotions have been shown to link with creative problem solving, helping behaviours and job satisfaction. We can help our clients to experience more positive emotions at work by getting them to think of ways in which they can seek out or create situations which are likely to make them feel good. One way to do this is to try and get them to think about the situations in which they experience 'flow'.
Flow is that feeling you get when you are so absorbed in a task that you're not aware of time passing and don't notice anything going on around you. It can enhance mood, boost self-esteem and give you a sense of purpose. Flow tends to happen when people are engaged with something they are good at but find hard. If we can get clients to identify times when they experience flow at work, we could then work with them to think about how they could get themselves in to those situations more frequently.
3. Gratitude
Being thankful and giving thanks for what you've got has been linked to greater well-being. It has been shown to stir up positive emotions, allows us to focus on our blessings, and creates an expectation and a confidence that good things will come to us. There is a little bit of evidence too that these positive outcomes apply to work-related gratitude. The authors therefore suggest that we should encourage our clients to count their work blessings and maybe even engage in thanking some of their colleagues for what they have brought to their working lives.
4. Work hope
Hope in an academic context means something much more specific than its definition in everyday conversation. In psychological terms it has three elements: a goal, a pathway to a goal and agency. So it's knowing where you want to get to, knowing how to get there, and believing that you can do it. Having hope is linked to increased self-esteem, making self-directed career decisions and is so closely associated with having meaningful work that some academics claim that it is in fact a core element of meaningful work, rather than a separate construct. Working with clients on identifying goals and breaking these down in to numerous sub-goals has been shown to help foster hope.
5. Job crafting
This is one which has been around for a while in career development theories but is new to positive psychology. It makes explicit the idea that we have some control over our jobs and can shape them to better meet our needs. Workers can engage in task, relational and cognitive crafting. This process results in individuals changing their daily work to involve more tasks which better suit them, spending time with people they work well with, and thinking about their work more positively. It has been shown to link with performance, satisfaction and commitment, so everyone is a winner!
6. Calling
Again, not a new one for many career practitioners. As sense of calling is when someone feels destined to fulfil a particular role which fits with their broader life purpose and has a connection with something pro-social. Links have been found in the research between having a calling and life wellbeing, job satisfaction and meaning at work. Conversations with clients which encourage them to think about the three key elements (what they were born to do, what do think matters in life, and what could they contribute to the greater good) can spark off ideas in clients who may not have identified their calling.
Dik, B.J., Duffy,
R.D., Allan, B.A., O’Donnell, M.B., Shim, Y. and Steger, M.F. (2015) Purpose
and meaning in career development applications The Counseling Psychologists, 43(4) 558 – 585
Friday 8 January 2016
Psychology-of-working perspective: A theory for the less privileged
A challenge that is often levelled at career decision making theories is that the whole notion of making a choice about what path to follow is a fanciful luxury for huge swathes of the population.
I love a career theory, but I never have a great answer for this - I try argue that most people have at least some kind of choice at some level, and also that even if choices are limited for many, we still need career decision making theories to help support the choices of others. But to be honest, It's a weak argument.
I love a career theory, but I never have a great answer for this - I try argue that most people have at least some kind of choice at some level, and also that even if choices are limited for many, we still need career decision making theories to help support the choices of others. But to be honest, It's a weak argument.
But here is a nice theory which specifically addresses the issue: the psychology-of-working perspective (Blustein, 2006). It's ten years old, but I've only recently come across it, and I think it's got something to offer.
The psychology-of-working perspective (Blustein, 2006) was developed to sit alongside traditional career decision making theories, and is aimed at helping us to understand the experiences of those for whom work is a basic form of survival rather than an expression of self-actualisation.
The authors of this theory highlight some particular groups of individuals who are likely to have limited choice over their career trajectories. These include those on welfare who are required to take any job which comes their way, those with learning disabilities, those who lack the economic or social resources to get the training they need to get the jobs they desire and those who are discriminated against on the grounds of gender, race, ethnicity or social class. They argue (rightly so) that people in these groups are less likely to have a wide range of options open to them, so the more mainstream career theories which encourage individuals to design their own lives, actualise their self-concepts or live out their values in their work, simply don't apply.
The authors of this theory highlight some particular groups of individuals who are likely to have limited choice over their career trajectories. These include those on welfare who are required to take any job which comes their way, those with learning disabilities, those who lack the economic or social resources to get the training they need to get the jobs they desire and those who are discriminated against on the grounds of gender, race, ethnicity or social class. They argue (rightly so) that people in these groups are less likely to have a wide range of options open to them, so the more mainstream career theories which encourage individuals to design their own lives, actualise their self-concepts or live out their values in their work, simply don't apply.
So this theory tries to be a bit broader and works at different levels. According to the psychology-of-working perspective, work fulfils three functions: survival and power; relatedness; and self-determination.
At the bottom of the pyramid, work provides us with a means to survive, and some source of power over our own lives, though access to material resources (ie money) and social resources (ie status). The second facet is relatedness - work allows us to develop meaningful relationships. Good relationships with colleagues have been shown to increase job satisfaction and improve well-being in all areas of our lives. The third element is the notion of self-determination (Ryan and Deci, 2000) which says that intrinsic motivation is always going to lead to more fulfilling work than extrinsic: if you can find a job your enjoy for its own sake, you're going to be happier than if you are just working to earn money to pay the bills. Blustein acknowledges that many of us are in jobs which aren't necessarily all that intrinsically interesting, but suggests that one thing that career practitioners could usefully do, is to work with clients to see if they can identify ways to make their jobs more fulfilling.
The theory suggests, much like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, that you need to have the lower needs met before you can start to think about the higher level needs: you're not going to start thinking about whether or not you have lovely colleagues until you are sure you're earning enough money to survive. In this way, the approach provides a single framework which explains the motivation of those who have limited work choices as well as those who have control over their career paths.
Alongside this explanatory framework, Blustein gives four recommendations for practice, suggesting that career practitioners should:
1) Foster empowerment
2) Foster critical consciousness
3) Promote skill building
4) Provide support for work volition
The first three aren't particularly innovative - career practitioners are well versed in encouraging clients to take ownership of their own career paths, ensuring their decisions are grounded in reality and ensuring that they are aware of their strengths and how they can build on them. The fourth though, this idea of supporting 'work volition' feels a bit different. The focus here is on getting clients to address the barriers which might be keeping them stuck at the 'survival and power' level, and maybe seeing if they could overcome, or even reframe the barriers.
I quite like this theory. It's perhaps not rocket science, but it does make sense to me, and I think that a theory which actually reflects the real lives of our clients is useful.
Alongside this explanatory framework, Blustein gives four recommendations for practice, suggesting that career practitioners should:
1) Foster empowerment
2) Foster critical consciousness
3) Promote skill building
4) Provide support for work volition
The first three aren't particularly innovative - career practitioners are well versed in encouraging clients to take ownership of their own career paths, ensuring their decisions are grounded in reality and ensuring that they are aware of their strengths and how they can build on them. The fourth though, this idea of supporting 'work volition' feels a bit different. The focus here is on getting clients to address the barriers which might be keeping them stuck at the 'survival and power' level, and maybe seeing if they could overcome, or even reframe the barriers.
I quite like this theory. It's perhaps not rocket science, but it does make sense to me, and I think that a theory which actually reflects the real lives of our clients is useful.
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