How I See It, How Everyone Else Sees It: Personal and Social Schemas of Career Success

Abstract

Extant research on career success takes two broad approaches to understand the phenomenon--the objectivist approach involves pre- defined indicators often ascribed by the researcher; the subjectivist approach takes the perspective of the career actor and thus provides idiosyncratic views of career success. Yet, little is known about commonly-held social beliefs among career actors. To address this gap, we investigated how individuals perceive career success, when defining it from multiple perspectives, by asking participants what career success means to them personally (i.e., a subscribed view) and how they believe others view career success (i.e., an ascribed view). We discovered that the evaluation of success is derived from specific career attainments. The extent to which theses attainments are related to perceptions of success, however, depends on (and is distinct from) the criteria respondents internalize to evaluate success. Further, we found that the process of evaluating careers is both a personal and social phenomenon in which individuals use varied criteria for evaluating their own success, and use limited criteria for evaluating others’ success. We present a model and propositions based on interviews from a sample of 44 career actors that demonstrates both the personal and social processes of career success evaluations, along with the potential consequences of those evaluations.