Creating a work environment that supports and rewards proactivity would be beneficial for employees and organisations, says Anders Dysvik
As employment relationships have become shorter and more flexible, the planning and management of careers has become more self-directed. This means employees are increasingly expected to be proactive in managing their own careers. Proactive career behaviours include the effort employees make to progress through career planning and skill development, and are characterised by three core components: taking control, anticipation, and information retrieval.
Taking control involves proactive career behaviours to consciously take control of one’s career progression and offers a sense of autonomy. Anticipation involves acting in advance and working towards personal career goals before actually achieving them. In terms of information retrieval, proactive career behaviours should facilitate access to information and resources that will help individuals to achieve their desired career goals.
These behaviours are positively related to career success, which makes sense; if you are more proactive in attempting to progress in your career, then you are more likely to achieve success. However, what is considered success can differ among cultures.
Evaluating success
When evaluating how successful we are in our careers, we are likely to have different priorities and be influenced by different norms or values depending on culture. Therefore, it is problematic that the majority of studies on proactive career behaviours have been conducted in single countries, predominantly the United States and Western Europe. These countries overwhelmingly reflect the WEIRD perspective – Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic – where a strong emphasis on self-management at work is more prevalent.
My research, conducted with colleagues across Europe, Canada, and Colombia, focused on the relationship between proactive career behaviours and the perceived achievement of two different meanings of subjective career success: perceived financial success and work-life balance. We used a sample of 11,892 employees from 22 different countries selected from nine culture clusters defined by the GLOBE (Global Leadership and Organisational Behaviour Effectiveness) project; a project developed to help those in leadership understand which countries had similar and differing cultures.
Overall, we found that employees were more likely to be proactive in their career to achieve subjective financial success than work-life balance. However, the importance of career proactivity to achieving either of these differed among cultures.
The Globe project identifies nine cultural competencies; characteristics which all cultures exhibit to varying degrees. It was how a country measured on four of these competencies which indicated what they considered worthwhile measures of success.
Career proactivity was found to be relatively more important for subjective financial success in cultures with high in-group collectivism, high power distance, and low uncertainty avoidance.
Cultures that considered career proactivity important for financial success scored lower on uncertainty avoidance; the way people in a society deal with unforeseen events and change. Countries that score low tend to be better at accepting change and are more willing to take risks. This included ‘Latin American’ and ‘Eastern European’ countries such as Georgia and Brazil.
Power distance concerns society’s views on individual status and the degree to which it accepts there is an unequal distribution of power and authority. Countries with high power distance, such as Japan and China, considered financial success to be an important indicator of career success which individuals should proactively strive for. High power distance cultures are characterised by strong hierarchies and limited upward social mobility.
For work-life balance, career proactivity was relatively more important in cultures with high human orientation and in-group collectivism.
Humane orientation
Humane orientation is the degree to which a society encourages and rewards individuals for being fair, altruistic, and kind to others. Societies high on this are characterised by a shared understanding that the interests of others are important with behaviours that promote the well-being of others being expected. This includes countries such as the US, UK, and Australia.
In-group collectivism is the degree to which individuals express pride, loyalty, and cohesiveness in organisations or families. In individualistic societies, individuals view themselves as independent and free to pursue behaviours that benefit them without much regard to the consequences for the larger group. Cultures measuring high on in-group collectivism, such as the UK and US, valued career proactivity in attaining a good-work life balance.
As in-group collectivism values group cohesion and common, it was assumed that they would view proactively pursuing financial success as selfish. Despite this, it was found that cultures with high in-group collectivism also considered financial success important in career success. An explanation for this finding may be that in-group collectivist societies assume individuals will use their financial success for the benefit of the whole group rather than individual or self-centred goals. In fact, in collectivist countries such as China, people tend to view work-family conflict as an inevitable cost in the pursuit of financial stability for the family.
There are a number of explanations as to how culture has an influence on what is considered career success. Firstly, culture affects how people interpret their own needs and values and therefore which career goals they are likely to focus on; individuals use their interactions with others to shape their needs, values, and perceptions. For example, a culture in which financial success is highly valued may lead individuals to believe that financial success should be important to them and that they should focus their career goals on achieving financial success.
Proactive career behaviours
Culture also exerts influence on which proactive career behaviours are seen as expected by others, such as a boss, colleagues, or family. Therefore, individuals who engage in these expected behaviours are more likely to view them as the norm.
Another explanation is that the information people can obtain from their environment is affected by culture. Information we can take in from our environment indicates what we should consider as important. Therefore, information we can obtain through proactive career behaviours are likely to match whatever is considered important in our culture. For example, if information from our culture tells us we should value a good work-life balance, then this is what we will strive for. This contributes to individuals achieving career goals that are most compatible with the values and norms of the culture.
As subjective career success is associated with greater life satisfaction and psychological well-being, it is important to understand what contributes to differing perceptions of individual success. Our findings suggest that proactive career behaviours are advantageous in terms of subjective financial success, regardless of culture. Such proactivity will be especially beneficial for employees in high power distance and low uncertainty avoidance cultures. For work-life balance, career proactivity is more likely to translate into a sense of career achievement in cultures with high in-group collectivism and humane orientation. This suggests that we should always be proactive in our careers, but keep in mind how culture may influence career goals held as important by those around us.
Organisations managing employees across countries and cultures would also benefit from understanding how a culture views and influences proactive behaviours and career goals as high career success can lead to lower turnover intentions and increased support for organisational change. Our results show that encouraging and supporting employees to become more proactive in managing their careers is likely to improve their subjective career success. Creating a work environment that supports and rewards proactivity, taking into account the impact of cultures on what is considered success, would therefore be beneficial for employees and organisations.
Anders Dysvik is Professor of Organisational Behaviour at BI Norwegian Business School
