New strategy, wrong managers? What you need to know about career streams

Academy of Management Executive

Volumn 12, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 21-37

  Gunz, Hugh P ^a   Jalland, R Michael ^b   Evans, Martin G ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

^b UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0002384613     PISSN: 10795545     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5465/ame.1998.650514     Document Type: Article

References (73)

1. Brousseau, K. R., Driver, M. J., Eneroth, K., and Larsson, R., 1986. Career pandemonium: realigning organizations and individuals, Academy of Management Executive. 10, (4):52-66.
2. Even in good times, career patterns are notoriously difficult to discern for the people making their careers within them. A number of researchers have found that individuals' perceptions of how they are doing in their careers can be quite at odds with the situation as it appears to an observer (Lawrence, B. S. 1984. Age Grading: The Implicit Organizational Timetable. Journal of Occupational Behavior 5:23-35;
3. Rosenbaum, J. E. 1989. Organization career systems and employee misperceptions. In Handbook of Career Theory, ed. M. B. Arthur, D. T. Hall, and B. S. Lawrence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
4. Gunz, H. P., and R. M. Jalland. 1996. Managerial careers and business strategies. Academy of Management Review 21:718-56.
5. Collins, J. C., and Porras, J. I., 1994. Built to Last. New York: HarperBusiness. Chapter 8 of this book is dedicated to this proposition. They talk about such phenomena as "talent stacked like cordwood at P&G" (page 175); "the deep bench at Motorola" (page 177), and offer the following revealing citation (page 169): "From now on, [choosing my successor] is the most important decision I'll make. It occupies a considerable amount of thought almost every day." Jack Welch, CEO, General Electric, speaking about succession planning in 1991 - nine years before his anticipated retirement.
6. In Slater, R. 1993. The New GE. Homewood, Il: Irwin, p. 358.
7. Some of the best-known models are Derr's career orientations. Driver's career self-concepts, and Schein's conical model of boundary-crossing (Derr, C. B. 1986. Managing the New Cateerists. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass;
8. Driver, M. J. 1980, Career concepts and organizational change. In Work, Family and Career, ed. C. B. Derr. N.Y.: Praeger;
9. Driver, M. J., 1982. Career concepts: A new approach to career research. In Career Issues in Human Resource Management, ed. R. Katz. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall;
10. Schein, E. H. 1971. The Individual, the Organization and the Career: A Conceptual Scheme. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 7:401-26).
11. Accounts of these perspectives: tournaments: Rosenbaum, J. E. 1984, Career Mobility in a Corporate Hierarchy, London: Academic Press;
12. vacancy chains: White, H. C. 1970, Chains of Opportunity, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.;
13. Pinfield, L. 1995. The operation of internal labor markets: staffing actions and vacancy chains, Plenum;
14. boundaryless careers: Arthur, M. B., and D. M. Rousseau, eds. 1996, The boundaryless career: A new employment principle for a new organizational era, New York: Oxford University Press;
15. career systems: Sonnenfeld, J. A., and M. A. Peiperl. 1988. Staffing policy as a strategic response: A typology of career systems Academy of Management Review, 13:588-600;
16. jungle gyms: Gunz, H. P., Careers and Corporate Cultures: Managerial Mobility in Large Corporations, Basil Blackwell 1989.
17. The original study is reported in Gunz, 1989, Careers and Corporate Cultures: Managerial Mobility in Large Corporations, op. cit.
18. The ideas have been linked to organizational learning (Jalland, R. M., and H. P. Gunz, 1993. Strategies, organizational learning and careers: the fall-out from restructuring. In Advances in Strategic Management, ed. P. Srivistava, A. S. Huff, and J. Dutton. Vol. 9. Greenwich, CN: JAI Press)
19. strategy-making (Gunz and Jalland, 1996, Advances in Strategic Management, op. cit.).
20. A further empirical study, using the methodology briefly outlined in the appendix of this paper, can be found in Gunz, H. P., and R. M. Jalland. 1996, Measuring barriers to mobility in organizations: a study of career prospects for senior administrators in a large university. In Best Paper Proceedings for the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, Cincinnati, Ohio; August.
21. We use Nigel Nicholson's term work role transition because it focuses on the essentials of the concept and avoids confusion about whether the move formally represents a change in job (see Nicholson, N. 1984. A Theory of Work Role Transitions. Administrative Science Quarterly 29:172-91;
22. Nicholson, N., and M. West. 1988. Managerial job change: men and women in transition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
23. Gunz, 1989 Managerial job change: men and women in transition. op. cit. p. 45.
24. Alvin Gouldner coined the term cosmopolitan in a pair of ground breaking papers (Gouldner, A. W. 1957. Cosmopolitans and Locals: Toward an Analysis of Latent Social Roles I. Administrative Science Quarterly: 281-306.;
25. Cosmopolitans and Locals: Toward an Analysis of Latent Social Roles II. Administrative Science Quarterly: 444-80).
26. Schumpeter, J. A. 1947. The Creative Response in Economic History. Journal of Economic History, 7:149-59.
27. Fligstein, N. 1990. The transformation of corporate control. Cambridge. Mass: Harvard University Press.
28. We described the three jungle gyms in terms of the different patterns of work role transition that are characteristic of each. In practice, several factors blur the picture somewhat: • It is not always straightforward classifying work role transitions into simple categories. For example, cosmopolitan and innovative moves can be hard to distinguish between at times: how different do two jobs have to be before a cosmopolitan move becomes an innovative jump? • People do not spend their working lives within any one organization, and indeed boundaries between organizations are becoming increasingly fuzzy as new ways of organizing are experimented with. As we have seen, career jungle gyms can span industries as well as companies (as in the case of Silicon Valley; see Everett Rogers' account of Silicon Valley, who shows that of 40 firms founded in the early period of the development of the region, 27 of the founders worked at Fairchild Camera (Rogers, E. M., and J. K. Larson. 1984, Silicon Valley fever: growth of high-technology culture, NY: Basic Books), and industries, such as advertising, which consist of many small firms). • People choose their own routes across the jungle gym, and may, for example, decide that they are not interested in building their careers in the way that is consistent with the modal organizational career logic.
29. For example, in Gunz's (1989, Silicon Valley fever: growth of high-technology culture, op. cit.) study of 115 managers in four large firms, the managers had experienced a total of 822 transitions, five kinds of work role transition were identified, and it was shown that the frequency with which the different kinds of transition occurred differed significantly between firms (p. 140). The differences in distribution of transition types between three of the firms was significant at the 0.5% level or better and consistent with the predictions discussed in the text of this article; the fourth firm had much less coherence in its structure and the business strategies of its divisions, and its mixture of command-centered and constructional logics was reflected in the pattern of transitions. The modal jungle gyms for the three distinctive firms were command-centered (Firm A), constructional (Firm B) and evolutionary (Firm C). Highlights from the differences: 1. In Firm A, cosmopolitan moves, the "marker" move for the command-centered jungle gym, were much more common than in the other firms. Nearly half of all moves (42 percent) were of this kind, by comparison with just over a quarter (26 percent) for Firm B and 28 percent for Firm C. 2. In Firm B, just over a quarter of all moves (27 percent) were innovation - a move to something completely new - as opposed to 12 percent and 14 percent for the other two firms. Iterative moves, the other marker move for constructional jungle gyms, were also more common (17 percent, by comparison with 8 percent and 4 percent); marker moves for the constructional jungle gym, then, totaled 42 percent for Firm B by comparison with 20 percent and 18 percent for the other two firms. 3. In Firm C the "expansion" marker move for the evolutionary jungle gym, in which the job effectively grows as responsibilities are accumulated, was the most common transition type (35 percent), and much more common than in the other two firms (18 percent and 20 percent respectively).
30. Career logics are tricky to map because there are hidden traps in the data-gathering process. For example, just asking one or two key informants is risky. We are all subject to a range of cognitive biases, one of the best-known being the so-called availability heuristic (see, for example, Kahneman, D., P. Slovic, and A. Tversky, eds. 1982. Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), which may cause informants' perceptions to be biased by easy-to-recall, unusual careers.
31. For example, the careers that are most easily brought to mind are usually those in which people have been promoted unusually quickly, or have experienced some unusual moves. Our overall impression of careers in a given firm is likely to be unduly colored by these vivid cases. On the other hand, one rarely has the time or funds to delve into the personnel records and build up a picture from a comprehensive study of careers over the past several decades (although there are examples of this having been done, for example: Rosenbaum, J. E. 1984. Career Mobility in a Corporate Hierarchy. London: Academic Press;
32. Forbes, J. B. 1987. Early intraorganizational mobility: patterns and influences. Academy of Management Journal 30:110-25).
33. An intermediate approach, which uses a computer-based technique to map the perceptions of a small sample of the firm's managers is briefly outlined in the Appendix. See also http://mgmt.utoronto.ca/∼hrmtext/ project/flowmap.htm.
34. Gunz and Jalland (1996), Academy of Management Journal op. cit.
35. This question has been studied by Glick and his co-workers and by Walsh, without very conclusive results (Glick, W. H., Beyer, J. M., Chattopadhyay, P., George, E., Knoll, K., Ogilvie, D. T., Pugliese, D., & Saxena, S. 1993. The selective perception of managers revisited. Presented at the Academy of Management meeting, Atlanta, Georgia;
36. Waller, M. J., Huber, G. P., & Glick, W. H. 1995. Functional background as a determinant of executives' selective perception. Academy of Management Journal 38(4):943-974;
37. Walsh, J. P. 1988. Selectivity and selective perception: An investigation of managers' belief structures and information processing. Academy of Management Journal 31(4):873-896),
38. although recent work is more encouraging (Geletkanycz, M. A., and S. S. Black. 1997. Functional career paths: A test of effects on top executive strategic orientation.: Paper presented at the 1997 Academy of Management Annual Meeting, Boston, MA).
39. The research of Lombardo and colleagues provides a wealth of detailed information on the developmental experience gained by executives moving between different jobs (McCall, M. W., M. M. Lombardo, and A. M. Morrison. 1988. The lessons of experience: how successful executives develop on the job. Lexington, Mass: Lexington Books;
40. McCauley, C. D., M. M. Lombardo, and C. J. Usher. 1989. Diagnosing management development needs: An instrument based on how managers develop. Journal of Management. 15:389-403).
41. Pinfield's study of a large forest products company (Pinfield, 1995, Journal of Management op. cit.) is a very detailed account of how moving between posts develops both the executives themselves, and the organization.
42. Miles, R. E., and C. C. Snow. 1978, Organization Strategy, Structure and Process, New York: McGraw Hill.
43. The link between the Miles and Snow typology, career logics, and organizational learning is discussed in Jalland, R. M., and H. P. Gunz. 1993. Strategies, organizational learning and careers: the fallout from restructuring. In Advances in Strategic Management, ed. P. Srivistava, A. S. Huff, and J. Dutton. Vol. 9. Greenwich, CN: JAI Press.
44. We take no position here on the argument about whether strategies are logically intended or are emergent from a stream of decisions.
45. See Gunz and Jalland (1996), Advances in Strategic Management, op. cit., for a full discussion of this issue.
46. Jalland & Gunz (1993), Advances in Strategic Management, op. cit.
47. The distinction between intended and realized strategies is described in the classic paper by Mintzberg and Waters (Mintzberg, H., and J. A. Waters, 1985. Of strategies, deliberate and emergent. Strategic Management Journal, 6:257-72).
48. Cyert, R. M., and J. March. 1963, A Behavioral Theory of the Firm, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
49. Burgelman, R. A. 1983. A Process Model of Internal Corporate Venturing in the Diversified Major Firm. Administrative Science Quarterly Vol. 28, 223-44.
50. One reviewer asked whether or not this firm might be a "Reactor". This firm did not fit the characteristics of a reactor firm. It had a clear and well defined strategy. Its structure was closely aligned to its strategy. Clearly, it was not a firm adhering to an outmoded strategy and structure as the changes involved strategic and structural change. This was a defender seeking a new alignment in its market.
51. See for example Cascio, W. F. 1993. Downsizing: What do we know? What have we learned? Academy of Management Executive, 7(1), February: 95-104;
52. Brockner, J., S. Grover, M. N. O'Malley, and M. A. Glynn. 1993. Threat of future layoffs, self-esteem, and survivors' reactions: Evidence from the laboratory and the field. Strategic Management Journal, 14:153-66;
53. Freeman, S. J., and K. S. Cameron. 1993. Organizational downsizing: A convergence and reorientation framework. Organizational Science, Vol. 4:10-29.
54. Actually, the situation is a little more complex: this case illustrates the way organizations can have more than one career jungle gym, and some of the complex ways in which these different systems can interact.
55. At the extreme, there was sometimes little communication between first and second year instructors so that gaps or overlaps within the area were ignored and, in one egregious case, the same case studies were used in the first and second year courses without the instructors being aware of the fact.
56. One reviewer suggested that this might be properly considered an evolutionary path: climbing the academic ladder requires the generation of knowledge through research; this was certainly the case at ISRUBS where promotion to full professor normally required the development of an international reputation in a chosen discipline. So in some sense, new aspects are being added to the task as the scholar's understanding deepens. This is not, however, how the evolutionary career as we have defined it plays out. Here, the tasks added are qualitatively different. See below for an example of a true evolutionary pattern built around the discipline.
57. st Century? NY: McGraw-Hill).
58. See, for example the special issue of the Journal of Management Education entitled Evolution and Revolution in Management Education: The Joys and Challenges of Change (Vol. 20, No. 4, November 1996), which contains a fascinating array of case studies showing that educational innovation has a profound impact on the lives of the institutions that try it.
59. McCall, Lombardo and Morrison, 1988, Journal of Management Education entitled Evolution and Revolution in Management Education: The Joys and Challenges of Change ( op. cit.
60. The technique is called "three-point career planning", after the basic rock climbing technique in which the climber always stays attached to the rock face by three points of attachment (e.g. two hands and one foot).
61. See, for example, Boyatzis, R. E., Cowen, S. S., Kolb, D. A. and Associates, eds. 1995. Innovation in professional education: Steps on a journey from teaching to learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass; and the writing on the "intelligent career" referred to below.
62. See, for example, Evans, M. G., H. P. Gunz, and R. M. Jalland. 1996. The aftermath of downsizing: a cautionary tale about restructuring and careers. Business Horizons Vol. 39, No. 3, May-June, pp. 62-66.
63. This interpretation was supplied by one of the company's vice chairmen, who made the connection for us between the jungle gym framework and the thought process that had gone into the changes.
64. Arthur and colleagues have played a seminal role in rethinking the role that boundaries play in constraining careers. Their recent book provides an excellent introduction (Arthur, M. B., and D. M. Rousseau, eds. 1996. The boundaryless career: A new employment principle for a new organizational era. New York: Oxford University Press).
65. The "intelligent career" concept is described in a recent AME article (Arthur, M. B., P. H. Claman, and R. J. DeFillippi. 1995. Intelligent enterprise, intelligent careers. Academy of Management Executive, 9(4):7-20).
66. More details are available in Gunz, H. P. and Jalland, R. M., Measuring barriers to mobility in organizations. Best Paper Proceedings of the 56th Annual meeting of the Academy of Management, Cincinnati, Ohio, August 1996.
67. This technique, which involves sorting cards with the names of jobs written on them into piles of similar jobs, was developed as a quick, practical way of discovering how top executives view the strategies of their competitors. See, for example, Daniels, K., L. de Chernatony, and G. N. Johnson. 1992. Theoretical and methodological issues concerning managers' mental models of competitive industry structures. Bradford: Presented to the British Academy of Management Conference;
68. Lant, T. K., and Baum, J. A. C. 1995. Cognitive sources of socially constructed competitive groups: Examples from the Manhattan hotel industry. In The Institutional Construction of Organizations, ed. W. R. Scott and S. Christensen. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
69. Widely used in many fields ranging from psychology to strategic management and based on Kelly's Personal Construct Theory, repertory grid technique probes the way we make sense of our world. See Fransella, F., and Bannister, D. 1977. A manual for repertory grid technique, London: Academic Press;
70. Bannister, D., and Fransella, F. 1986. Inquiring man: the psychology of personal constructs, 3rd ed. London: Croom Helm;
71. Dunn, W. N., A. G. Cahill, M. J. Dukes, and A. Ginsberg. 1986. The policy grid: A cognitive methodology for assessing policy dynamics. In Policy analysis: Perspectives, concepts, and methods, ed. W. N. Dunn. Greenwich, CN: JAI Press;
72. Ginsberg, A. 1990. Connecting diversification to performance: A sociocognitive approach. Academy of Management Review, 15:514-35.
73. ™, has been developed for the purpose; more details can be found at http:// mgmt.utoronto.ca/∼hrmtext/project/flowmap.htm.