Thesis (M. Ed.(Educational psychology))-University of Pretoria, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references. Available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

A number of practitioner surveys across a range of industries have cited the lack of senior female role models as a barrier to career progression. There is very little academic literature to explain this at a senior organizational level. An initial review of the extant role model literature led to the inclusion of two further related areas – organizational demographics, as a contextual factor affecting the availability of role models, and work identity development as a link between the lack of senior female role models and the lack of career progression. In seeking to answer the question of why and then how female role models are important for senior women, this study fills an identified gap in the comprehension of the concept of role models and their importance in the workplace. It addresses a need to understand both the key elements of the concept and the mechanism by which they come into play. The research uses qualitative methods, specifically in-depth semi-structured interviews. These were conducted with a senior group of 33 female directors from six global investment banks, in order to elicit their experiences of role models in demographically imbalanced work contexts. Analysis of interview data considered all three areas of role models, demographic context and work identity development. As the women forged their identities in the male-dominated context of global investment banks, what became clear was that who they are and have become was informed by the critical relationships they have had. Whilst clearly some of the women had found male role models with whom to develop these critical relationships, there were some identity issues, particular salient to women, which could not be addressed by men. Thus the findings demonstrated the utility of female role models. This thesis has a number of contributions to make on varying levels: On a conceptual level, this study adds to our understanding of the value of role models, particularly detailing the affective or symbolic value. It has added to the conceptualization of role models, detailing what were the core attributes of individuals chosen to be role models, who they were in relation to the women, how the women used them and why they were important. It has combined the three literature areas of role models, organizational demographics and work identity development in a way not previously done, and has shown empirically that they are related and explain each other. Organizational demographics affect the availability of role models. And it is suggested that the relatively new theory of relational identification is the mechanism that explicates how the presence of positive female role models is a key influence on women’s work identity development. It has clarified the value of role models in extreme gender demographic contexts, and how and why they are important to senior women’s professional development, thereby adding to the theory of role modelling. Practically, the study explains why women in surveys may have been citing the lack of female role models as such a prominent issue, and suggests what some of the issues are that organizations should pay heed to in trying to address this.

Economic changes have resulted in a new contextual spectrum for career development with relatively secure, hierarchical, organizational structures at one end and flatter, de-layered, insecure environments at the other. This narrative review explores the literature relating to the psychological determinants of career plateauing in older managers against such a background. The body of literature informing this issue was analysed using the systematic review method. This is designed to produce a transparent and replicable account of how pertinent studies are located and the basis on which they are either included or rejected through use of explicit relevance, generalisability, and quality criteria. The overall outcome is a synthesis and summary of what is known about the topic, the limitations of the review, and identification of gaps in knowledge - the latter forming recommendations for future research. The findings of this review indicate that a range of subjective determinants may play a part in career plateauing in older managers including fairly stable attributes such as personality, and individual and social identity, and more fluid factors such as attitudes, and motivation. Motivation may be driven by one or more goals including future success, present job satisfaction or ongoing personal development. Numerous other determinants may play a role but little evidence is available as to how the range of potential influences operates at an individual level. Further qualitative research is needed into individual older managers’ experiences and how they may differ according to gender.

This study explores what UK managers aged 50 and over perceive as career progression at a time in life when opportunities for further promotion may have ceased. It examines motivational drivers and subjectively significant personal and organizational influences on career progression. It also investigates whether motivation for career progression is perceived to have changed over the career and the extent to which it may differ between male and female older managers. The research adopted a qualitative, inductive approach using a phenomenological methodology. Fieldwork comprised semi-structured interviews with 27 male and 13 female managers aged 50 and over from two large, UK financial services organizations. The findings show how motivation for career progression in managers aged over 50 is driven by individually diverse patterns of career drivers, personal and work-related influences, and attitudes towards career opportunities. These can be classified into a number of career progression orientations. The study contributes to knowledge in the area of subjective psychological career mobility in late career and the balance which individuals maintain between the organizational and personal aspects of their career. It demonstrates that motivational drivers of career progression are perceived to change over the career and that career progression is linked, on an individual basis, to past, current and future career mobility which may extend past the traditional retirement transition. It also reveals that, in general, older female managers may exhibit a greater drive for self-realisation through later life career renewal than their male counterparts.

Recently, since music festivals and ¡§live house¡¨ performances have become popular in Taiwan, the number of independent bands have been increased gradually. Bands nowadays have more advantages than previously, but they also face more challenges, such as commercial factors, keen competitions among other bands, the impact of new music style, including electronic music and Hip Hop, and so on. Above all, the most challenging one is the source of incomes. Therefore, rock musicians always face the difficulty of career change. This study attempts to explore the career development of Taiwanese rock musicians. The questions are listed as follows. First, what are their motivations to be rock musicians? How can they earn their living as rock musicians? Second, what is their career planning and career development? Third, why do some of the rock musicians decide to look for other jobs? What are the processes they have to go through while transferring to other jobs? Can they adjust to new jobs well? The based theories of the study are career development and career planning. The methods of data collection include observation, documental analysis and interview. The study uses triangulation to increase credibility and reliability. The objects are six rock musicians who live in Taipei and Kaohsiung. The conclusions are as follows. (1) The most remarkable motivations to influence the rock musicians in Taiwan are the learning experiences, the career conditions, social environment, and musicians¡¦ personality. (2) According to the result, the career-decision process and career development task correspond to the theories of Ginzberg and Super. (3) Economic problem is the significant motivation that prompts the rock musicians to change to other jobs. Remarkably, they anticipate making the decisions on schedule, not accidentally. Besides, most of the interviewers transfer to other jobs during the five transferring periods which Levinson proposed in his theory. (4) Western rock music influences Taiwanese rock musicians both on music style and outer appearance. (5) Taiwanese rock music style is different in every place associated with the ¡§urban characteristic.¡¨ (6) Famous and mainstream rock bands and musicians can have more economic power to earn their living as rock musicians. (7) Taiwanese rock music workers have to make more improvement as western ones, especially on creative work. (8) Rock musicians of different ages have distinct expectations on their own career life and future. (9) Female rock musicians have more advantages than males on outer appearance, while they are more limited by marriage and family on the other hand. (10) Married or some rock musicians with heavy economic burden may be influenced on their career development. Finally, Few suggestions are generated from this study: First, when one decides to ento this career, he must cultivate his musical ability well. Second, he must take his own responsibility and understand his works¡¦ position in the music market.

The purposes of this study were to discover patterns in test scores when both the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Strong Interest Inventory are used simultaneously and to offer career counselors practical ways to interpret the scores when counseling their clients. To do this, the researcher conducted one study using canonical correlation to study the relationships and interrelationships between scores on the MBTI dichotomies and the SII GOTs. A second study utilized MANOVA to increase our understanding of age and gender differences in scores on these two instruments. Another study sought to use case examples of clients who had completed both tests to explain practical ways that career counselors can help their clients understand and apply results of both tests in ways that most benefit the clients’ career decision making. From the results of these studies, it would appear that the most common scores to occur simultaneously on both tests at once are MBTI Intuition, and SII Artistic. One could conclude from this that the personality characteristic of enjoying working in settings that allow for creative endeavor is particularly strong relative to other personality characteristics measured by these tests. We could also conclude that as individuals age, they are more likely to prefer working in settings that allow them to pursue creative endeavors. Another conclusion supported by this data indicates that men are more comfortable with career fields that are unstable and entrepreneurial than women throughout the lifespan.

The Relationships of Career Development, Job Satisfaction, and the Objectives of On-job Continuing Study of the Employees ¡V A Case Study of Iron & Steel Industry Abstract Iron & steel Industry, the basic industry of a country, which is closely related to economic steadiness and defense independence, is known as ¡§the Mother of Heavy Industry.¡¨ However, owing to the striking changes of the industrial structure in the recent years, employees must endeavor to life-long learning on their own initiatives, and enhance their career competitiveness by talents transition so as to seek for more opportunities for suitable jobs and growth in the career life. The purpose of this study is to have a further understanding of the influences of the career development phase, job satisfaction, and continuing study objectives of iron & steel industry employees on different personal variables, as well as their interrelationships, in the hope of providing the findings of this research to the iron & steel industry as the reference for the follow-up plan of education training or personal life-long learning in enhancing the job satisfaction of the employees and human resources qualities. This research is grounded on the theoretical basis derived from related literature. Then, questionnaire investigation is adopted with the employees of the manufactures affiliated to Taiwan Steel & Iron Industries Association taken as the targets, and 650 employees for sampling survey. The number of valid questionnaires obtained is 433. The followings are concluded after conducting quantitative analysis in statistic method with the information obtained. 1. Most of the employees of the iron & steel industry are in the phase of growth enhancement and mature development. 2. The division of the career phases of the employees in the iron & steel industry is not limited to age and seniority, but related to the personal variables including gender, education, marriage status, position, etc. 3. The job satisfaction of the employees in the iron & steel industry is only in the level of ¡§fair.¡¨ Especially, most of the employees are not satisfied with the aspect of ¡§administrative supervision.¡¨ 4. Continuing learning is highly demanded by the employees in the iron & steel industry. 5. The employees in the iron & steel industry pursue for continuing study with many-sided objectives which may differ because of various personal backgrounds. The objectives of ¡§expansion in social contacts¡¨ and ¡§opportunity for career change¡¨ are the most agreeable objectives, while ¡§evasion or excitement¡¨ is the least agreeable one. 6. The perceptions of job satisfaction are related to the career phases of the employees. Especially, the phase of ¡§mature development¡¨ and the job satisfaction in every perspective are positively interrelated, while the phase of ¡§frustration and decline¡¨ and the job satisfaction in every perspective are negatively related. 7. Mostly, the objectives for employees to pursue for continuing study are not resulted from the influence of job satisfaction. Only the satisfaction with ¡§task content¡¨ and ¡§administrative supervision¡¨ has a cause-and-effect relation with the objective of ¡§the expansion of social contacts.¡¨ 8. Career development phase may lead to different objectives for the employees to pursue further learning. Key words: Career Development, Job Satisfaction, Objectives of On-job Continuing Study.

Earlier stage career research of the Electronic Engineers ¡V example from Foreign Company Abstract The objective of this paper is to understand why electronic engineers select engineer to be their career. Through individual life story to get better knowledge from engineers about how the decision-making resource, self concept and thread of thought from social culture affect their career decision during engineers¡¦ earily stage of life. Because there are so many situations for a person to make decisions in their on-going life, the quantitative methodology might not exactly present the complicated aspect of this study, hence the narrative qualitative approach is chosen as the methodology of this study. Through intensive interviews to collect life stories, we interviewed seven engineers, four of them are R&D engineers and three of the others are Application Engineers. To have broaden views , sample cases¡¦ born years are selected from 1950 to 1978, we believed this could be helpful for us to see the difference in the selected cased. When we put together all the seven career decision-making narrative stories of the engineers, the issues that affect career decision-making were distinguished into four aspects which includes decision-making resources collecting, self-concept, important others that affect decision-making and the social culture stand for in their age. Key words : Electronic Engineers, Career development, Self-concept, Social Culture.

In recent years, in order to adjust to the global trend, the financial policy and development in Taiwan change rapidly. With constant transformation and mergers, the banking industry attempted to upgrade the advantages of competition. The employees have to face diverse financial products and the compression and alternation of the personnel. The enterprises value the employees¡¦ satisfaction of psychological contract and the employees hold the attitude of professional commitment. Thus, the employees can explore better direction of prospect and the enterprises can also manage appropriate arrangement of work force. In addition, financial professional capacity is the capital and core value of banking industry. In this environment with severe competition and with the concern of personal development, the employees would contribute differently in terms of their specialty. In order to keep the excellent employees, the enterprises remain mutually beneficial relationship with the employees with mutual respect and commitment. The employees also value the professional cultivation which will be beneficial for the maintenance of the talents and developmental management of the organization. This research regarded the employees of local banking industry as the targets and distributed 510 questionnaires and there were 398 returned. As to the analysis of data, the researcher used reliability analysis, factor analysis, t-test analysis of independence, analysis of variance (ANOVA), Pearson¡¦s product-moment correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis. Based upon the empirical survey, the researcher obtained the following significant findings: 1.Seniority of current position revealed difference with regard to salary of psychological contract. 2.Gender and educational degree revealed larger gap upon professional identification. 3.Gender, age, marital status, educational degree, type of company, service seniority in the company revealed prominent difference with regard to development of prospect. 4.In Psychological contract, appropriateness at work, degree of learning satisfaction and inclination of staying revealed prominent negative correlation. Professional identification revealed prominent positive correlation with pursuing secure life, challenging life, professional life and promotional life. Inclination of staying revealed prominent positive correlation with pursuing secure life, challenging life and promotional life.

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