Planning your career pays

The era of lifelongs job is over, as we all know. Shorter and more flexible employment relationships are now offset by the growing importance of personal initiative. In other words, it’s becoming vital to take a proactive approach to managing your career, to look forward, focusing on your future goals, and take the all the right actions to achieve them. This might mean acquiring new competencies, or interfacing with co-workers and senior colleagues to gather information. But to what extent will a proactive approach truly impact your career? And what makes a career a success anyway?

Coming up with a definition for a successful career is not as easy as it may seem. Objective parameters like promotions or raises don’t always reflect the fluid and less hierarchical reality we find in organizations today. What’s more, criteria like these ignore vital aspects that tie into self-realization such as work-life balance, and overlook the personal satisfaction people may or may not get from their achievements, compared to their initial expectations.

This is why it’s worthwhile to focus on subjective perceptions of success. By this we mean understanding how much proactive behavior enhances people’s satisfaction with various aspects of their careers, from financial success to work-life balance.

In Western countries, where there is a strong accent on self-management, the positive effect of proactive behavior is something we may take for granted. But in other cultures with different value hierarchies, the dynamic might be different as well. By doing a comparative analysis, taking into account a variety of possible dimensions of professional success in diverse cultural contexts, we can come to a better understanding of the relevance and the effects of proactive behaviors.

The national culture can shape the perception of proactivity among its people in a number of ways. First, if certain proactive behaviors are perceived as something people are compelled to adopt by the socio-cultural context, and not a free choice, those behaviors will be seen in a less positive light at an individual level. Second, the values that characterize a culture prompt people to prioritize certain goals (for instance, financial success) over others (work-life balance). Lastly, a given culture will press people to focus on acquiring certain resources and information rather than others.

In a recent studio with nearly 12,000 participants from 22 countries belonging to 9 different cultural clusters, we explored the potential impact of five specific dimensions on people’s perceptions of what makes a successful career: in-group collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, performance orientation and humane orientation. We then broke down the perception of success into two distinct elements: financial success and work-life balance.

In general, we found that irrespective of the culture, adopting proactive behaviors has a positive impact on the perception of financial success - but in the realization of a work-life balance.

In cultures with high in-group collectivism, instead, proactivity shapes the perception of success in terms of work-life balance in a positive way – possibly a reflection of the fact that society views this type of goal as more relevant. Likewise, in cultures with a strong humane orientation, proactivity seems to be associated more with the perception of success defined as work-life balance. This finding is consistent with the fact that these cultures place value on interpersonal relationships and taking care of others.

In contrast, in cultures where there is more distance from power, the perception of success associated with career self-management is measured mainly in financial terms. This may reflect the greater weight that these cultures place on status, from an economic and material standpoint. Where there is higher risk avoidance, instead, the tendency to minimize uncertainty as much as possible leads to a more cautious approach to career management. In these cases, we found a lower level of the subjective perception of success defined by financial considerations..

Last, contrary to what we might have expected, greater orientation toward performance does not seem to impact the perception of success in any way, neither from a financial viewpoint nor in terms of work-life balance.

A proactive career approach is perceived as a success driver from a financial viewpoint, but not for work-life balance. To achieve a better work-life balance, in fact, being proactive on an individual level is not enough. There also needs to be support both inside and outside of the organization (for example, in the family). This means it’s harder for people to enact initiatives that give them the perception of control over work-life balance; similarly it’s more complicated to gather information from colleagues that helps achieve this balance.

To a certain extent, cultural values affect the way individuals believe they can directly shape their own careers. In cultures where power is more distant and risk avoidance is lower, people feel like they can impact their success primarily in financial terms; instead where collectivism and humane orientation is higher, this perception is tuned in mostly to work-life balance. In any case, overall the influence of culture is weaker than what we may have thought, which suggests that there is a “shared sentiment” that ties into the relationship between individual proactivity and having a successful career.

To sum up, having a proactive approach to your career pays off at an individual level by heightening the personal satisfaction you get from your achievements, especially from a financial standpoint. This satisfaction in turn enriches your psychological wellbeing. The takeaway here for organizations is that encouraging their collaborators to take a proactive approach could be an effective strategy for enhancing their satisfaction – as long as this is combined with initiatives that shore up their loyalty to the organization.