Career transitions and their causes: A country-comparative perspective

Chudzikowski, Katharina
Demel, Barbara
Mayrhofer, Wolfgang
Briscoe, Jon P.
Unite, Julie
Milikić, Biljana Bogićević
Hall, Douglas T. (Tim)
Heras, Mireia Las
Shen, Yan
Zikic, Jelena

¹ WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria
² Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois, USA
³ University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia
⁴ Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
⁵ IESE Business School, University of Navarra, Barcelona, Spain
⁶ York University, Toronto, Canada

^*Correspondence should be addressed to Dr Katharina Chudzikowski, Interdisciplinary Unit of Management and Organisational Behaviour, WU, Althanstrasse 51, A-1090 Vienna, Austria (e-mail:[email protected]).

Received 31 August 2008; revised version received 25 August 2009

Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology 82(4):p 825-849, December 2009. | DOI: 10.1348/096317909X474786

This empirical paper investigates how individuals conceptualize causes of career transitions, focusing on the three European countries of Austria, Serbia, and Spain in comparison to the USA and China. Collectively, these countries represent four separate cultural regions according to Schwartz. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with members of three occupational groups: business people, nurses, and blue-collar workers. Analysis of the data generates greater insight about the existence of both region-specific patterns as well as potentially universalistic tendencies regarding perceived causes of career transitions. Perceptions of internal (to the person) drivers of career transitions as activating forces are evident in all five countries. The overall results support contemporary notions of occupational careers that are highly individualized, a characterization strongly emphasized in the current career literature. In the European culture clusters, causes of career transitions are attributed internally and externally. China, representing the Confucian cultural region, stresses external causes for career transitions. By contrast, in the USA only internal attributions of causes are reported.