Career dynamics : matching individual and organizational needs

290 Pages·1992·7.767 MB·English

by  Schein, Edgar H.

career dynamics:
matching individual and organizational needs
CAREER DYNAMICS:
MATCHING INDIVIDUAL
AND ORGANIZATIONAL NEEDS
EDGAR H. SCHEIN
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sloan School of Management
A
▼T
ADDISON-WESLEY PUBLISHING COMPANY
Reading, Massachusetts • Menlo Park, California
London • Amsterdam • Don Mills, Ontario • Sydney
To Louisa, Elizabeth, and Peter
This book is in the Addison-Wesley series:
ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT
Editors:
Edgar H. Schein
Richard Beckhard
Warren G. Bennis
Copyright © 1978 by Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. Philippines copyright
1978 by Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical photo­
copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America. Published simultaneously in Canada. Library
of Congress Catalog Card No. 77-93330.
ISBN 0-201-06834-6
ABCDEFGHIJK-DO-798
FOREWORD
It has been five years since the Addison-Wesley series on organization
development published the books by Roeber, Galbraith, and Steele,
and it is almost ten years since the series itself was launched in an
effort to define the then-emerging field of organization development.
Almost from its inception the series enjoyed a great success and helped
to define what was then only a budding field of inquiry. Much has
happened in the last ten years. There are now dozens of textbooks and
readers on OD; research results are beginning to accumulate on what
kinds of OD approaches have what effects; educational programs on
planned change and OD are growing; and there are regional, national,
and even international associations of practitioners of planned change
and OD. All of these trends suggest that this area of practice has taken
hold and found an important niche for itself in the applied social
sciences and that its intellectual underpinnings are increasingly solid­
ifying.
One of the most important trends we have observed in the last
five years is the connecting of the field of planned change and OD to
the mainstream of organization theory, organizational psychology,
and organizational sociology. Although the field has its roots pri­
marily in these underlying disciplines, it is only in recent years that
basic textbooks in “organization behavior” have begun routinely re­
ferring to organization development as an applied area that students
and managers alike must be aware of.
iv FOREWORD
The editors of this series have attempted to keep an open mind on
the question of when the series has fulfilled its function and should be
allowed to die. The series should be kept alive only as long as new
areas of knowledge and practice central to organization development
are emerging. During the last year or so, several such areas have been
defined, leading to the decision to continue the series.
On the applied side, it is clear that information is a basic nutrient
for any kind of valid change process. Hence, a book on data
gathering, surveys, and feedback methods is very timely. Nadler has
done an especially important service in this area in focusing on the
variety of methods which can be used in gathering information and
feeding it back to clients. The book is eclectic in its approach, reflect­
ing the fact that there are many ways to gather information, many
kinds to be gathered, and many approaches to the feedback process to
reflect the particular goals of the change program.
Team building and the appropriate use of groups continues to be
a second key ingredient of most change programs. So far no single
book in the field has dealt explicitly enough with this important pro­
cess. Dyer’s approach will help the manager to diagnose when to use
and not use groups and, most important, how to carry out team build­
ing when that kind of intervention is appropriate.
One of the most important new developments in the area of
planned change is the conceptualizing of how to work with large sys­
tems to initiate and sustain change over time. The key to this success is
“transition management,” a stage or process frequently referred to in
change theories, but never explored systematically from both a theo­
retical and practical point of view. Beckhard and Harris present a
model which will help the manager to think about this crucial area. In
addition, they provide a set of diagnostic and action tools which will
enable the change manager in large systems to get a concrete handle on
transition management.
The area of organization design has grown in importance as or­
ganizations have become more complex. Davis and Lawrence provide
a concise and definitive analysis of that particularly elusive orga­
nization design—the matrix organization—and elucidate clearly its
forms, functions, and modes of operation.
Human resource planning and career development has become an
increasingly important element in the total planning of organization
improvement programs. Schein’s book provides a broad overview of
this field from the points of view of the individual and the total life
cycle, the interaction between the career and other aspects of life such
as the family, and the manager attempting to design a total human re­
source planning and development system.
FOREWORD v
Future volumes of the series will continue to explore the connec­
tions between OD and other areas of management and organization
theory—OD in the multinational context, a diagnostic framework for
managers to use in starting up change programs, the role of alternative
work patterns in increasing “the quality of work life,” and the theory
and practice of job redesign as a strategy of organization change.
It is exciting to see our field develop, expand, strengthen its roots,
and grow outward in many new directions. I believe that the core
theory or the integrative framework is not yet at hand, but that the
varied activities of the theoreticians, researchers, and practitioners of
planned change and OD are increasingly relevant not only to the
change manager, but also to line managers at all levels. As the recogni­
tion grows that part of every manager’s job is to plan, initiate, and
manage change, so will the relevance of concepts and methods in this
area come to be seen as integral to the management process itself. It
continues to be the goal of this series to provide such relevant concepts
and methods to managers. I hope we have succeeded in some measure
in this new series of books.
Cambridge, Massachusetts Edgar H. Schein
March 1978
PREFACE
The evolution and writing of this book have represented for me the
pulling together of strands of work which have been going on for the
last 15 years. I began with an interest in how organizations bring in
and train their new members. The original purpose of the panel study
which supplied much of the data for this book was to determine how
people’s values would change as a result of their organizational expe­
riences. As I learned more about the evolution of careers and the
problems which organizations face in developing their human re­
sources, I realized that the early-career and training perspective was
too narrow. One could not really look at the total problem of adult
value changes or human resource management solely from the individ­
ual career occupant’s point of view.
A second strand which is therefore reflected in this book is an
interest in better understanding the concept of a total career. I have al­
ways been interdisciplinary in my approach to organizational prob­
lems and have found that to understand careers, one had to be both
psychologist and sociologist/anthropologist. We do not have as yet a
good set of concepts or a theory of how careers develop, and this book
is not intended to provide such a theory, because we do not yet know
enough. But major portions of this book are intended to illuminate
how complex career dynamics really are and to forewarn readers not
to accept too glibly some of the simple formulations of how to have a
successful career which are circulating around. Most of the attention
in this book is devoted to organizational careers, especially technical,
PREFACE vii
professional, and managerial ones. The concepts evolved for career
analysis should have some applicability to a broad range of other
occupations, however.
A third strand of interest is reflected in the strong argument
which I make throughout the book that organizations must be con­
cerned with the total problem of human resource development for the
sake of not only humanistic values, but organizational survival as
well. My experience as an organization development consultant has re­
vealed over and over again an insufficient sensitivity on the part of
senior managers to the relationship between effective management of
human resources and organizational performance and survival. Such
effective human resource management must begin to take into ac­
count the long-range human issues—how organizational careers devel­
op and evolve over time and how the organization must plan for its
own sake to deal with the shifting needs of its people and the shifting
nature of its work for which people will be needed. The link between
formal planning and planning for human resources is increasingly be­
coming a matter of necessity rather than of convenience.
The fourth and final strand which is reflected in this book derives
from my own aging and the recognition on a very personal level of
how one’s total life must be viewed in an evolutionary and total eco­
logical context. The interaction of family, work, and more personal
developmental concerns is very visible to me in myself, in my wife and
family, and in my colleagues and their families. These phenomena are
not really new, but changing social values have legitimized a more
open discussion of them, and certain social trends, such as the trend
toward dual careers, has made the issues more salient. The body of re­
search on adult development is growing rapidly so that conjecture can
gradually be replaced by demonstrated fact. But more important,
both individuals as career occupants and managers who must make
career decisions for others in organizations are becoming highly aware
of the importance of thinking about the total adult in a total life cycle.
Because of the multiple strands which are reflected in this book, I
have also written for multiple audiences. Some of the findings from
my research panel have most relevance to young people entering orga­
nizations and to those managers who manage the entry and early-
career phases. The developmentally oriented chapters are for those
readers who want more insight into themselves and how their career
and family issues can be put into a better personal perspective. The
more organizationally oriented chapters, toward the end of the book,
are written for managers who have to worry about organizational
planning, especially human resource planning. All of the book is rele­
vant to managers who wish to gain more insight into how to improve
viii PREFACE
their own careers and how to deal more effectively with their own sub­
ordinates.
The ideas of this book derive from many sources, and I mast
therefore acknowledge a variety of intellectual debts. My many years
of collaborative work with Richard Beckhard have deeply influenced
my thinking, and Dick’s editing of an early draft of this book directly
influenced its present shape. My original mentor, the late Douglas
McGregor, taught me what mentoring was all about long before I
knew the term or its theoretical significance in today’s adult develop­
ment writings. Warren Bennis, Dave Berlew, Chris Argyris, and Dave
Kolb were valued colleagues and collaborators on some of the early re­
search and idea formulation on how individuals and organizations
interact.
My main thanks, however, must go to my present colleagues
Lotte Bailyn and John Van Maanen, who have been engaged with me
over the past several years in an intense intellectual debate about
work, family, career, organizations, and society. It is out of this joint
intellectual effort that I acquired a real understanding of how work
and family interact, how needs change throughout the adult life cycle,
and how individual-organizational interactions must be conceptual­
ized. We have done some joint writing, and each of us has pursued
special interests within this broader context, but without the many
hours of discussion, debate, testing of ideas, and joint research effort
I would not have been able to formulate many of the arguments of this
book. The arguments are my own, but their influence on my thinking
is clear and central.
I owe a special debt to the 44 Sloan School alumni who were will­
ing to become a panel in 1961, 1962, and 1963 and who were willing to
return to M.I.T. in 1973 to be interviewed and surveyed about their
evolving careers and lives. I found that the personal clinical approach
was necessary to achieving an understanding of what career dynamics
were all about, and I wish to thank the panelists for their continued
willingness to probe with me into their lives.
The panel research would not have been possible without the sup­
port of the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the special support of
Dr. Bert King, who made the follow-up study in 1973 possible. In
today’s climate of publicly challenging many forms of government
support for research, I think it especially important to express my per­
sonal view that ONR has always been truly dedicated to basic research
in the social sciences and has made a tremendous contribution to the
field of social and organizational psychology through its willingness to
support projects such as my panel study.
PREFACE ix
My other major intellectual debt is to my many clients over the
past 20 years. The opportunity to work on management development,
organization development projects, team building at top corporate
levels, and counseling individuals and groups about a wide range of
human resource issues has provided some of the perspective I have
needed to launch into this book. They, like the members of my re­
search panel, must remain anonymous, but I freely acknowledge my
debt to them for the ideas and stimulation which made this book
possible.
In the process of rewriting, editing, and sharpening the book sev­
eral people were especially helpful, and I wish to thank them at this
time. Warner Burke, Bob Lee of the Exxon Corporation, Gene Dal­
ton, Dick Beckhard, Lotte Bailyn, and John Van Maanen each made
useful specific comments on all parts of the manuscript. However,
Kirby Warren of Columbia University taught me a lesson in what true
colleagueship can really be by not only challenging and enhancing
ideas throughout the manuscript, but also giving virtually page-by-
page editorial comments which immensely improved the final written
version. I am extremely grateful to him for what must have been a
very time-consuming effort.
I also wish to thank Marc Gerstein, who has been a helpful critic
and, more important, has developed and applied in his organization
many of the ideas about human resource planning and career develop­
ment set forth in this book.
Work on the manuscript was tirelessly done by Madeleine Keyes
and Brenda Venuti, and I thank them for their many hours of effort.
I also wish to thank my wife, Mary, who shared with me the run­
ning of an adult development seminar for Sloan Fellows and discussed
at length with me what working, parenting of teenage children, and
adult developmeni are really all about and thereby helped to clarify
many of the ideas which ultimately found their way onto the following
pages. We have continued this seminar, which is now in its third year,
and have found it to be a useful crucible for continuing to explore
what happens to people and their families as their careers and lives
unfold.
Finally, I want to dedicate this book to my children—Louisa,
Elizabeth, and Peter—who watched with interest its evolution, but
who have their own confrontations with its subject matter still ahead
of them.
Cambridge, Massachusetts E. H. S.
March 1978