Job‐change and age: The experience of administrators in colleges and universities

Abstract

Job‐change is widely regarded as the primary means of career advancement for professionals in bureaucratic organizations. However, while the relationship between mobility and age has been suggested, age differences, when they have been recognized at all, have been variously interpreted, but rarely related to organizational selection and career cycles. In this paper we explore the relationship between job‐change and age for one kind of professional employed in bureaucratic organizations–academic administrators in colleges and universities. This is accomplished by determining job‐change rates for administrators in different age cohorts as a function of type of position held and gender. Analyzing mail questionnaires from academic administrators in one state, the research also tests the efficiency‐motivation model of mobility which suggests that job‐change serves two diverse and possibly conflicting functions of meeting an organization's need to select and advance persons to perform necessary tasks as well as serving as an important source of employee motivation. The results indicate the presence of several patterns of job‐change and suggest that the theory, with some modifications, offers a framework for conceptualizing and analyzing academic administrator mobility.