Human Resource

Management:
An Asian Perspective
(Second Edition)

Chapter 10

Managing Careers

Gary Dessler and Chwee Huat Tan

© 2009 Pearson Education South Asia Pte Ltd.
All rights reserved.
 After studying this chapter,
you should be able to:
1. Compare a company’s traditional and career
planning-oriented HR focuses
2. Explain the role of the employee, manager and
company in career development of the
employee
3. Describe the issues to consider when making
promotion decisions
4. Answer the question: How can career
development foster employee commitment?
5. Discuss the career plans of managers in some
Asian companies
10–2
 Purpose of this Chapter

 Help you to be more effective at

managing employees’ careers
 Discuss role of employee, amanger and
company in career development
 Know procedures for managing promotion
and transfer
 Discuss steps that a company can take to
foster employee commitment

10–3
 Basics of Career Management

Career
– A series of job positions that people have
held during their working life
Career management
– The process for enabling employees to
better understand and develop their career
skills and interests, and to use these skills
and interests more effectively.

10–4
 Basics of Career Management

Career planning
– The process through which a person sets work-
related goals, acquires the necessary skills, and
seeks opportunities to achieve these career
goals.
Career development
– The lifelong series of activities that contribute
to a person’s career exploration, establishment,
success, and fulfillment (such as attending
courses).
10–5
 Basics of Career Management

Careers today
– Careers are no simple progressions of
employment in one or two firms with a single
profession.
– Employees now want to exchange
performance for training, learning, and
development that keep them marketable.

10–6
 Traditional Versus Career
Development Focus
HR Activity Traditional Focus Career Development
Focus
Human resource Analyzes jobs, skills, Adds information about
planning and tasks – present individual preferences,
and future. Uses and the like to data.
statistical data.
Training and Provides opportunities Provides career path
development for learning skills, information. Adds
information, and individual growth
attitudes relate to job. orientation.
Performance appraisal Rating and/or rewards Adds development
plans and individual
goal settings.
Source: Adapted from Fred L. Otte and Peggy G. Hutcheson, Helping
Employees Manage Careers (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992), p.
10. 10–7
 Traditional Versus Career
Development Focus
HR Activity Traditional Focus Career Development
Focus
Recruiting and Matching organization’s Matches individual and
placement needs with qualified jobs based on a
individuals. number of variables
including employees’
career interests.
Compensation and Rewards for time, Adds non-job-related
benefits productivity, talent, activities to be
and so on. rewarded, such as
United Way leadership
positions.
Source: Adapted from Fred L. Otte and Peggy G. Hutcheson, Helping
Employees Manage Careers (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992), p.
10.

10–8
Employee Career
Development
Plan
Source: Reprinted with permission of the publisher,
HRnext.com Copyright HRnext.com, 2003.

10–9
 Roles in Career Development

 The Individual
– Accept responsibility for your own career.
– Assess your interests, skills and values.
– Seek out career information and resources.
– Establish goals and career plans.
– Utilize development opportunities.
– Talk with your manager about your career.
– Follow through on realistic career plans.

Source: Fred L. Otte and Peggy G. Hutcheson, Helping Employees Manage Careers
(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992), p. 56.

10–10
 Roles in Career Development

 The Manager
– Provide timely performance feedback.
– Provide developmental assignments and
support.
– Participate in career development
discussions.
– Support employee development plans.

Source: Fred L. Otte and Peggy G. Hutcheson, Helping Employees Manage Careers
(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992), p. 56.

10–11
 Roles in Career Development

 The Organization
– Communicate mission, policies, and
procedures.
– Provide training and development
opportunities.
– Provided career information and career
programs.
– Offer a variety of career options.

Source: Fred L. Otte and Peggy G. Hutcheson, Helping Employees Manage Careers
(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992), p. 56.

10–12
 Innovative Corporate Career
Development Initiatives
 Provide each employee with an individual budget for
personal development.
 Let employees work in different positions to help them
discover their occupational strengths and weaknesses.
 Encourage small groups of employees to meet and
support one another in achieving their career goals.
 Offer career development materials and career
workshops on related topics.
 Make career and development courses available.
 Provide career planning workshops.

10–13
 Innovative Corporate Career
Development Initiatives
 Offer on-site or online career centers.
 Encourage role reversal.
 Establish a “corporate campus.”
 Help organize “career success teams.”
 Provide career coaches.
 Utilize computerized on- and offline career
development programs
 Establish a dedicated facility for career development

10–14
Sample Agenda—
Two-Day Career
Planning
Workshop
Source: Fred L. Otte and Peggy Hutcheson,
Helping Employees Manage Careers (Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992), pp. 22–
23. In addition to career development training
and follow-up support, First USA Bank has also
outfitted special career development facilities at
its work sites that employees can use on
company time. These contain materials such as
career assessment and planning tools.

10–15
 Managing Your Career

 Identify Your Career Stage

10–16
 Managing Your Career

 Identify your career stage:

– Growth stage (Birth to 14 years old)
– Exploration stage (15 to 24 years old)
– Establishment stage (24 to 44 years old)
• Trial substage
• Stabilization substage
• Midcareer crisis substage

– Maintenance stage (45 to 65 years old)

– Decline stage (after 65 years old)
10–17
 Managing Your Career

 Identify occupational orientation

1. Realistic orientation
2. Investigate orientation
3. Social orientation
4. Conventional orientation
5. Enterprising orientation
6. Artistic orientation
 The closer the orientations of a person, the
easier he/she chooses a career.
10–18
Choosing an Occupational
Orientation

10–19
Example of Some Occupations that
May Typify Each Occupational Theme

10–20
 Identify Your Skills

 Successful performance depends on

motivation as well as ability
 Skills needed for specific occupations
such as accountants or bankers
 A person’s aptitudes, such as intelligence
and mathematical ability, are measured
by a GATB for planning purposes

10–21
 Identify Your Career Anchors

Career anchor
– A concern or value that you will not give up if a
[career] choice has to be made.

Typical career anchors

– Technical/functional competence
– Managerial competence – Analytical, Interpersonal &
Emotional Competences
– Creativity
– Autonomy and independence
– Security
10–22
 Identify Your Career Anchors

Typical career anchors

– Managerial competence – Analytical, Interpersonal &
Emotional Competencies

Analytical Interpersonal Emotional

Competence Competence Competence
Ability to identify, Ability to influence, Capacity to be
analyze, and solve supervise, lead, stimulated by
problems under manipulate, and emotional crises
conditions of control people at all rather than be
incomplete levels exhausted by them,
information and capacity to bear high
uncertainty levels of
responsibility
10–23
 Managing Promotions and
Transfers
Making promotion decisions
– Decision 1: Is Seniority or Competence the
Rule?
– Decision 2: How Should We Measure
Competence?
– Decision 3: Is the Process Formal or Informal?
– Decision 4: Vertical, Horizontal, or Other?

10–24
 Making Promotion Decisions

Decision 1: Is Seniority or Competence the

Rule?
– Focus on competitiveness favors competence
– Ability to use competence dependent on:
• Whether company is bound by union
agreements, or
• Any civil service requirements

10–25
 Making Promotion Decisions

Decision 2: How Should We Measure

Competence?
– Straightforward for measuring past performance:
• Define job, set standards, appraise performance
– Additional for promotions:
• Procedure for predicting candidate’s potential for
future performance

10–26
 Making Promotion Decisions

Decision 3: Is the Process Formal or

Informal?
– Informal, employees conclude that:
• “who you know” more important than performance
• Working hard to get ahead is futile
– Formal, employees conclude that:
• Promotion based on performance

10–27
 Making Promotion Decisions

Decision 4: Vertical, Horizontal, or Other?

– 2 parallel vertical career paths:
• Managers (management-tracked positions)
• Seniors (non-supervisory)
– Horizontal career path:
• Inter-dept transfer to learn new skills and to test
the employee’s aptitudes

10–28
 Managing Promotions and
Transfers
 Handling Transfers
– Employees’ reasons for desiring transfers
• Personal enrichment and growth
• More interesting jobs
• Greater convenience (better hours, location)
• Greater advancement possibilities
– Company’s reasons for transferring employees
• To vacate a position where an employee is no longer
needed.
• To fill a position where an employee is needed.
• To find a better fit for an employee within the firm.
• To boost productivity by consolidating positions.
10–29
 Career Management and
Employee Commitment
 “New Psychological Contract”
– Employees prepare for next career move
while working in current company
– Companies to decide how to maintain
employee commitment to minimize voluntary
resignation and maximize employee effort

10–30
 Career Management and
Employee Commitment
 Commitment-oriented career
development efforts
– Career development programs
• Career workshops that use vocational guidance tools
(including a computerized skills assessment program and
other career gap analysis tools) to help employees identify
career-related skills and the development needs they
possess.
– Career-oriented appraisals (review form)
• Provide the ideal occasion to link the employee’s
performance, career interests, and developmental needs
into a coherent career plan.

10–31
Sample
Performance
Review
Development
Plan
Source: Business & Legal Reports, Inc.

10–32
 Retirement

 Retirement
– The point at which one gives up one’s work, usually
between the ages of 60 and 65.
– Free from daily requirements of job
– Sense of loss
– Some companies provide pre-retirement counselling

10–33
 Retirement

 Pre-retirement practices
– Explain retirement benefits
– Leisure time counseling
– Financial and investment counseling
– Health counseling
– Psychological counseling
– Offer part-time employment as an alternative to
retirement
– Counseling for second career inside the company
– Counseling for second career outside the company

10–34
 Confucian Cultural Perspectives
on Work and Career
 Cross-cultural study by Granrose
– Compared Chinese and North American
organizations
– Confucian view of human self
• Become a virtuous person in relation to others
– American view
• Individuals control their career at the workplace

10–35
 Career Management in China

 Leadership Behavior and Employee

Turnover
– People respect authority
– Superior’s evaluation affects how
subordinates view themselves
– Employees develop self-conception and stay
with company if superior shows
consideration, support and believes in them

10–36
 Career Management in
Hong Kong
 Study by Chow:
– Interviewed 71 middle managers
– Only large companies had career planning
 In manufacturing companies, people left
because of:
– Better opportunities elsewhere (50%)
– Job did not meet personal goals (20%)
– No further promotion (10%)
 In US companies, people left because of :
– Dissatisfaction with job, pay, location
10–37
 Career Management in Japan

 Study by Baba:
– Interviewed 96 line managers (66 in
Japanese firms and 30 in US subsidiaries)

 In Japanese companies:
– Lesser performance review (39%)
– Career path depends on loyalty
– Career management techniques: Training,
testing, job rotation, knowledge about
company
10–38
 Career Management in Japan

 In US companies:
– Lesser performance review (39%)
– Lesser career path for employees (10%)
– Career path depends on performance
– Career management techniques: coaching &
counseling

10–39
 Career Management in Taiwan

 Study by Peng:
– Surveyed 103 line managers (20 in US subsidiaries)
 In manufacturing companies:
– Skills and performance are factors to develop career
 In US companies:
– Skills and performance are factors to develop career
– Career plans for employees (90%)
– Career management techniques: Job posting, job rotation,
career testing
– Immediate supervisor, spouse, friends, colleagues are factors
to develop career

10–40
 Career Management in Thailand

 Cultural values influence career goals

– Ego (face saving and criticism avoidance
– Grateful (paternalistic) relationship
– Smooth personal relationship
– Flexibility
– Education competence
– Interdependence
– Fund and pleasure
– Achievement orientation
10–41
 Career Management in Thailand

 Study by Chainuvati and Granrose

– Surveyed 42 companies
– Concept of career management
• Not well developed
– Career planning included
• Performance reviews
• Training
• Counseling
• Job rotation
– Criteria for promotion
• Performance, seniority, political influence

10–42