HEARING A DIFFERENT DRUMMER

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Finally the model demonstrates that NFPO managers make recourse to different groups for social comparison when they evaluate their career rewards.
Dancing just for the sake of it? Conceptualizing career success in NFPOs – a theoretical framework Martin A. Steinbereithner Einstein Consulting 31 Lynton Road London W3 (HL UK Tel. +44 (0) 7866 495 853 [email protected]

Wolfgang Mayrhofer Interdisciplinary Unit of Management and Organisational Behaviour Wirtschaftsuniversitaet (WU) Wien Althanstr. 51 A-1090 Wien, Austria Tel. ++43-1-31336-4554 Fax ++43-1-31336-724 [email protected]

Please address correspondence to the first author. Keywords: career; career success; NFPOs; theory

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DANCING JUST FOR THE SAKE OF IT? CONCEPTUALIZING CAREER SUCCESS IN NFPOS– A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

ABSTRACT

Cinderella’s “dream of a better life, life without cruel treatment by her stepsisters and stepmother” as well the question “where is she going herself – and with what ‘porpoise’” can be rephrased in the more sober terminology of research as an individual’s wondering about his or her career and the dimensions of life and career success. Such wondering often intensifies if it goes beyond the mainstream societal dance floors, in Cinderella’s case: the prince’s castle symbolizing the power centre of those days. This paper picks up both themes and looks at careers of managers in an untraditional contemporary dance floor, i.e. NFPOs (NFPOs). NFPOs are an untraditional dance floor of society as they straddle two worlds: that of business with all its budgets, metrics for success and criteria for efficiency, and that of the fields of voice or service where they operate with its goal ambiguity, idealism, resistance to formalization and dilettantism. Like any organization NFPOs are also managed by individuals, and these individuals are confronted with the typical career issues such as worklife balance, reward and success, remuneration, status and the like. However, one particular feature for NFPOs, and hence for their managers as well, is the lack of profit-making motive as key driver: it is rather goals such as relief of poverty, lobbying or cultural achievements which are in the forefront of the organization’s consciousness. This already poses serious challenges when it comes to setting measures which allow the organization to determine its success. But it also raises questions for the individual and how he sets his own criteria for success, since neither hefty end of year bonuses nor career advancement are on offer, or even sought after. Given these specifics, it is surprising that careers in NFPO would have received so little academic attention. With some notable exceptions (Francis & Kenny, 2000; Glaser & Zenetou, 1996; Lohmann, 1992; Mayrhofer, 2001) there have been precious few attempts in understanding how careers work in NFPOs, and for managers of NFPOs in particular. This paper further reduces this deficit by asking how managers in NFPOs conceptualize their career success. It proposes a theoretical model based on social cognitive theory describing their process of career success conceptualization. Thus, we are able to gain some insight into the special dance of NFPOs’ Cinderellas, i.e. the unique and shared characteristics of their careers, as well as better understand who Cinderella is, what makes her special, and how she might actually have something to contribute to the party. Social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1991) establishes a dynamic interplay between personality, the environment and human behavior. Applied to careers this means that individuals respond to the circumstances of their work environment in the way they conceptualize their career success, but various career outcomes also in turn influence the individual and his subsequent career behavior. The proposed Cognitive Career Success Model (CCSM) (Steinbereithner, 2006) identifies four loops in conceptualizing career success.

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The first loop encompasses the process of setting career goals and then achieving or failing to achieve them. Any achievement leads on one hand to revised goals but also significantly impacts the individual’s self-efficacy. This in turn will change the motivational make-up and attitude of the individual and his plans, aspirations and goals. The second loop identified is that of attribution: once a particular result is achieved, a lot depends on how an individual attributes its causes, whether they were internal or external, controllable or not. The same objective result can be interpreted very differently by various individuals and thus lead to varying levels of subjective career success. The third loop looks at the rewards which particular achievements have yielded. The individual will seek to evaluate whether what he has received is equitable or not, and adjust his behavior accordingly, by either exerting less effort or seeking greater rewards for current levels of output. The final loop is concerned with the phenomenon of social comparison: what constitutes success does not just depend on the intrinsic value of particular rewards, but how they compare to what others have received. It is in the comparison with others that some of the value is attributed. Having dissected the conceptualization process of career success into its constituent parts we are able to look at similarities and differences between for profit and not-for-profit managers in this regard. We can see that personality differences impact the way goals are set. Varying levels of intrinsic motivation will be more or less sensitive to crowding out effects through extrinsic rewards. The level of goal congruence between individuals and organizations impacts how much particular career outcomes will be interpreted as success. The model also shows that some professions have their own patterns of attribution, and that some individuals in NFPOs will be less likely to be equity-sensitve than for profit managers. Finally the model demonstrates that NFPO managers make recourse to different groups for social comparison when they evaluate their career rewards.

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Table of content

Abstract .............................................................................................................................. 2 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 5 Careers and career success in NFPOs ............................................................................. 6 Careers................................................................................................................................................... 7 Organisational demography ........................................................................................................... 7 Reluctance and resistance against organizing ................................................................................ 7 Boundary spanning – inhabitants of various logics........................................................................ 8 Relationship to environment .......................................................................................................... 8 NFPOs as a modern career field? ................................................................................................... 9 Career success ....................................................................................................................................... 9

A cognitive career success model ................................................................................... 12 Theoretical foundations...................................................................................................................... 12 Basic model.......................................................................................................................................... 12 A dynamic view ................................................................................................................................... 14 The goal setting loop .................................................................................................................... 15 The attribution loop...................................................................................................................... 15 The equity loop ............................................................................................................................ 16 The social comparison loop.......................................................................................................... 17

Discussion and application.............................................................................................. 19 - Constructs ......................................................................................................................................... 19 - Processes & Loops ............................................................................................................................ 22 - Applications ...................................................................................................................................... 24 research ........................................................................................................................................ 24 practice ......................................................................................................................................... 25

Concluding remarks ........................................................................................................ 26 References......................................................................................................................... 26

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INTRODUCTION Careers are a central phenomenon of societal, organisational and individual reality in both a practical and theoretical sense. On the one hand, careers touch a number of ‚real-life‘ issues. This includes, e.g., the change of available careers due to societal and political developments, the renewal and shaping of the organisational workforce through the existence of different organisational career paths or the consequences of pursuing different careers for personal success and status. On the other hand, careers are theoretically most significant, too. Located at the „intersection of societal history and individual biography“ ((Grandjean, 1981): 1057) they link micro- and macro-frames of references ((Schein, 1978)), both of which have traditionally been regarded as indissoluble ((Barley, 1989b); (Gunz, 1989)). Managerial careers are an important part of the picture. Because organizations are a major characteristic of modern societies and managers contribute significantly to the development of organizations ((Steyrer, 1999)), gaining insight into the formation and stabilization of management careers is important. Both careers in general and managerial careers are subject to extensive and multidisciplinary career research efforts ((Arthur, Hall, & Lawrence, 1989a: 10)). Career research tries to understand at different analytic levels what happens when individuals travel through their professional lives (for overviews and comprehensive views see, e.g., (Hughes, 1951); (Becker & Strauss, 1956); (Super, 1957); (Glaser, 1968); (Dalton, 1972); (Holland, 1973); (Slocum, 1974); (Spilerman, 1977); (Van Maanen, 1977); (Schein, 1980); (Arthur, Hall, & Lawrence, 1989b); (Hall, 1987); (Ornstein & Isabella, 1993); (Arnold, 1997: 15 ff.); (Baruch, 2004): 3ff.). However, within this rich body of research, there are at least two curious gaps. First, career success has received comparatively little attention and has generally been poorly understood and operationalised. This is surprising since a well developed understanding of dimensions, antecedents and consequences of career success is essential for other issues central to individuals and organizations. It can support coaching efforts helping individuals with career decision making (Colombo & Werther, 2003) or designing more effective career interventions. Likewise, it potentially improves human resource management efforts. Knowledge of career success mechanisms may inform recruitment research on how to attract and secure high-caliber job candidates. Likewise, measures for influencing (intentions to) turnover may benefit from a better understanding of components and processes of career success. In terms of motivation and well-being, this is relevant, too. Understanding what people want from and for their careers helps when creating a motivating environment with the adequate amount of stress (Aryee, Chay, & Tan, 1994). Hence, while an adequate conceptualization of career success is for the most part absent, it is highly needed. Second,Not for profit organizations (NFPOs) 1 have largely been ignored by career research. With a few notable exceptions (see, e.g., (Francis et al., 2000; Glaser et al., 1996; Lohmann, 1992; Mayrhofer, 2001), there is little work done specifically on careers in NFPOs. This is even truer for theoretical or empirical studies of career success in NFPOs. Beyond results that highlight basic motives for working in NFPOs (see, e.g., (Handy, 1988; Leete,

1 We prefer the term “NFPO” to “nonprofit organization”: while it is a bit more cumbersome, it more accurately describes what the issue is.

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2000; Preston, 1989; Theuvsen, 2004; Young, 1986)) or shed light on people opting for working in this sector (see, e.g.,(Rawls, Ullrich, & Nelson, 1975; Stein, 2002)) little can be found that specifically relates to the specifics of career success in NFPOs. This theoretical study contributes to filling both gaps by asking how individuals in NFPOs conceptualize their career success. Focusing on employed managers and taking service-oriented NFPOs as implicit point of reference, it proposes a dynamic cognitive career success model that identifies major elements and processes that are lead to the individual perception of career success in NFPOs. In a first section, we will look at careers in NFPOs and how differ from other careers. We will also seek to understand what we mean when we speak of career success. The second section will outline a basic model for career success conceptualization, based on cognitive psychology. The third section will consider the relevance of this model to understanding career success in NFPOs. We will also point to implications for further research and for HR and management practice. CAREERS AND CAREER SUCCESS IN NFPOS NFPOs have been around for centuries and impacted societies significantly. While there are different views on their emergence such as government and market failure or competitive advantage because of trust that exists due to their distribution constraint and which is unparalleled by public institutions, there is considerable agreement on their core features. Although there exists an ongoing debate about the constituting characteristics of NFPOs ((Salamon & Anheier, 1997)), a number of elements seem to evolve as standard structuraloperational elements. They include a minimum of formal organization, being private and subject to a non-distribution constraint, having autonomy of decision and a minimum of volunteering (Van Til, 1994). This makes NFPOs, which exist in a great variety of forms ranging from institutionalized small grassroots group for down syndrom children to a large metropolitan museum (an effort of classification of NFPOs is, e.g., the ICN, the International Classification of NFPOs, see (Salamon et al., 1997)) different from for-profit organizations. However, they also are inhabitants of two worlds ((Badelt, 2001)). In the for-profit, commercial and political world they have to raise their funds and sell their services. However, it is the non-commercial world which they seek to serve, be it that of art, sport, health or charity. By bridging these worlds NFPOs are exposed to conflicting expectations and stakeholders who are often quite at odds with each other. Both their differences from for-profit organizations and their bridging characteristics lead to a number of peculiarities in their management. Examples include sometimes contradictory goals aiming at commercial viability as well as at ideological or moral integrity [Anthony, 2003 #122;DiMaggio, 2001 #849;Dart, 2004 #1163]which are often vague, complex and hard to operationalize, (DiMaggio, 1987; Simsa, 2002), the difficulties to measure success (Moss Kanter & Summers, 1987);(Anthony & Young, 1988; Osborne, 1996; Sawhill & Williamson, 2001) or the resistance against formalization with a great emphasis on trust (Hansmann, 1986; Mason, 1984; Rose-Ackerman, 1996). As a consequence, careers, career success and its conceptualizations have specific characteristics in NFPOs, too.

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Careers

Organisational demography Organizational demography refers to various aspects of the structure and composition of human resources such as age, gender, ethnicity, length of employment etc (Nienhüser, 1991). Due to a variety of factors such as organizational growth, recruitment strategies, labor market situation or HR policies, organizational demography constantly changes. It is, among others, an important condition for managing organizations, too. Factors such as age structure, qualification profile, or ethnicity can support organizational measures or limit them. NFPOs’ demography usually has a great amount of heterogeneity and diversity due to a dimension normally not found in for-profit organizations: the differentiation between employed staff and volunteers. In addition, the basic motivation to work for a NFPO, either as employee or as volunteer, is usually highly diverse. Such demography has consequences for career in NFPOs. Not only will the competencies of the work force, comprising employed and volunteer staff, be highly diverse. What people want from their careers, how and what they value as positive career outcome and success will vary. e.g. employees who are idealistic and loyal to a cause are likely to differ in terms of valued career outputs and in terms of evaluation criteria for career success. This makes career planning extraordinarily difficult and many tailored solutions are required. Reluctance and resistance against organizing We can observe a tendency in NFPOs- but not only there- to prefer small groups which still allow for informal relationships and decision making over strongly formalized stuctures and processes which tend to abstract from the individual and his needs. In other words individuals want to preserve emotionally rich and meaningful contexts, rather rhan cold and impersonal organizations. (Zauner, 2002). Resistance against organizing can thus be described by the tendency to personalize and to avoid the division between person and function, even though individuals in organizations are first and foremost a resource, given the division of labour. Hence the other parts of their lives are consequently largely ignored. But NFPOs, especially those which have a grassroots feel to them, emphasize the subjective dimension of each individual: he is considered much more a fellow warrior and the defender of a common vision and ideal, rather than the one who fulfils a particular function in a large collective: thus the emphasis on trust when it comes to trade off between trust and control. This is only logical if the other members of the organization are seen much more as allies in a common cause rather than bearers of a particular function ((Zauner & Simsa, 1999): 409). Similarly informal structures and ways of solving problems are given preference over more formalized and impersonal ones. This leads to a particular dilemma in NFPOs to find the right balance between formal and informal structures. When we consider this in conjuction with the specific organizational demography we can see that different groups in the organization will find different solutions for how to negotiate the formal and informal demands of their tasks. There are also particular consequences for careers in such organizations. First this interplay between informal and formal structures leads to a very specific career field: its rules

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are much less clear and more open to intepretation than in other types of organizations. Secondly the emphasis on informality means that that there are a lot fewer positions in the NFPO career field. Career patterns will be more varied, since there might well be a formal and an informal career path. The relationship between the formal and informal positions can lead to somewhat unpredictable and complicated constellations. Thirdly the role of the ideology and world view in NFPOs will mean that next to technical competence other elements will serve as criteria inin career advancement. Fourthly social capital i.e. the ability to network and build relationships will play an important role to advance one’s career, given the absence of very predictable and formalized career paths (Mayrhofer et al., 2003). Similarly belonging to a particular social group which appears commpatible with the goals of the organization (e.g. a church in some religious NFPOs) can be an important indicator whether somebody is qualified for career advancement. Boundary spanning – inhabitants of various logics NFPOs are by their very nature boundary spanners. One the one hand, they operate in societal subsystems of art, sport, health or politics, to mention just a few examples. There the logic is one of meaning and values. But since they also raise income, incur costs and higher employees, they also participate in the economic subsytems of society ((Zauner, 1999): 122). Hence various logics are at work, and at times at conflict with each other within the same organization. The carricature of the accountant pushing for greater professionalization while the volunteer urges less formality and control is not that far from the truth. This is what Etzioni long ago called dual organizations (Etzioni, 1964). For careers this means that it is hard to obtain benchmarks and measures which would allow us to differentiate between individuals and their career progress. In the for profit world such basic metrics as hierarchy level, number of reports and salary size tend to provide a unified basis of information. In NFPOs volunteers might play a more important role in the organization than a full-time employee who actually earns a salary. How will an employee with excellent business qualitications be evaluated if he wants to work for an NFPO? On the other hand this boundary spanning aspect of NFPOs can potentially be attractive for individuals with very diverging interests and competencies (Stein, 2002). The most obvious example is the growing field of social entrepreneurs (Rose-Ackerman, 1996; Young, 1986) who combine entrepreneurial ambitions with idealistic tendencies. Relationship to environment NFPOs have a very particular relationship with their environment. As mentioned previously they are often positioned right where different societal subsystems meet. As a result they can find themselves with a number of external stakeholders who need to be taken into consideration when pursuing one’s mission ((Horak, Matul, & Scheuch, 1999): 158; 172). One classic example of this stems from the divergence between funders and customers/clients. This requires a balancing act in order to keep two, rather than just one group happy. There is also an increasing dependence from external funders ((Heimerl-Wagner & Meyer, 1999): 210), as competition between NFPOs increases (Alexander, 2000; Eikenberry & Drapal Kluver, 2004). As public-private partnerships become more frequent and NFPOs

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begin to ensure tasks formerly assumed by the state, new goals and considerations suddenly become important (Paulsen, 2006). For NFPO careers this means again that specific social capital will be required in order to succeed i.e. whom one knows and how one negotiates the relationships with external stakeholders. They in turn will probably have increasing importance on careers and promotions in NFPOs they intereact with: this does not have to happen through conscious and direct influence. Simple mechanisms of isomorphism will mean that organizations and individuals will seek to behave in ways that correspond to the expectations and organizational logics of such stakeholders (Grey, 1999; Paton & Foot, 2000). NFPOs as a modern career field? When we consider all the specificities of NFPOs, in particular as they concern careers in such organizations, we can argue that NFPO careers present all the marks of modern career fields. The relative lack of formal structures in favour of informal ones, the increasing fluidity of internal processes and structures, the new forms of organizational membership which are often quite removed from classic employment agreements, the prominence of networks within but also beyond the organization itself and which include external stakeholders- all these traits are quite often mentioned when speaking of “cutting edge” organizations.

Career success The discussion about career success is not a new one. Already in 1934, Thorndike attempted to predict career success and came up with the following dimensions of success: earnings, job status and satisfaction (Thorndike, 1934). However defining success proved a much harder task, which led Stott to the despairing remark:” I would suggest that the word "success", like so many ordinary words adopted in psychological usage, has acquired so many meanings that it has ceased to be meaningful, and that it should be discontinued in psychological discussion”. Subsequent research has continued to work on predictors of career success. (Childs & Klimoski, 1986). Nevertheless, no common understanding has emerged about characteristics, dimensions and operationalisations of career success. Recently, a new interest in career success can be observed, which leads to a new intensity of discussion (see, e.g. the fact that two complete sessions of the career division at the 2002 Meeting of the Academy of Management were devoted to that topic) as well as to attempts of unpacking the concept of career success (e.g., (Heslin, 2002, 2005; Seibert, Kraimer, & Liden, 2001)). The lack of a common frame of understanding career success is not surprising. Any conceptualisation of career success depends on the theoretical background as well as the specific context in which careers and career success are placed – and both are manifold. Implicit in most of the discussion of career success is the usual point of reference for much of the management literature: medium to large sized For-Profit organisations. This leaves out a number of different organizations, such as NGOs, public organizations and NFPOs, where there is a real question whether classic success criteria hold true (Francis et al., 2000; Taylor & Sumariwalla, 1993) So what then is career success? Just as career is a “Janus-like concept” (Barley, 1989a:49), so is career success: the term career encompasses both the structural and public aspect, also often called the objective one, but also the subjective one, by which we mean the

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meaning which individuals attribute to their career. Similarly objective caeer success would then be the success which is verifiable and measurable in an interpersonal way; subjective career success however is the individual’s assessment of objective and subjective rewards in his career. Objective career success is the outcome of one’s career, as measured against objective criteria such as income, span of control, and advancement. Subjective career success is the evaluation of one’s career according to personal criteria. Objective career success is most often measured by things like salary levels, rank of promotion or occupational status and while such measures are useful in some career contexts, there is a question to what extent they are meaningful in other organizational contexts, such as NFPOs. Subjective career success, is often expressed through satisfaction. The most common way to make this concept operational has been with the the scale of Greenhaus (Greenhaus, Parasuraman, & Wormley, 1990). Income, advancement and personal development are the main dimensions of his satisfaction concept: but there might be others, like helping others, having had enough time for other things, etc. So while satisfaction might be a useful concept for explaining and operationalizing subjective career success, its usefulness is largely dependent on how many dimensions it covers. Put differently, subjective career success is a composite construct, and its usefulness depends on our ability to capture all its constitutive parts. Both Homans (Homans, 1961) and Bruggemann (Bruggemann, Groskurth, & Ulich, 1975) have pointed out that satisfaction is not an monolithic construct, resulting from a certain set of work conditions; nor does it simply have to do with experiences of success or failure on the job. Rather, it is the fruit of a complex cognitive process which is based on a number of different reference systems. Wiswede suggests four such systems: the level of experience, the level of social comparison, the level of possible alternatives, and the level of adaptation.. The idea is that job satisfaction is the compound result of various judgements, based on these different reference points. Thus, the judgements are individually very different from one another, even if the job conditions themselves are the same. In such a case, measuring job satisfaction is a more complex undertaking. Not only does one need to assess personality (Furnham, 1992:212), job characteristics (Neuberger, 1974) or work climate (n.n., 2003), but one also needs to assess the various discrepancies upon which the satisfaction judgement is based. So far, no instrument has been developed to make this operational. But job satisfaction is not yet the same as career satisfaction. We might find a particular job quite interesting and challenging, but if I do not perceive any prospects for development or promotion, I might in the medium-term be satisfied with my career. Conversely you might agree to a job which is not particularly exciting because you know it will help you move forward in your career. So while job satisfaction and career satisfaction are related, they are not simply identical. Most studies which refer to subjective career success use career satisfaction as the only measure for it. But it is doubtful whether career satisfaction is a sufficient measure for subjective career success. But while life satisfaction and job satisfaction are related, they are not the same so that one could be happy with one’s career and still be unhappy overall. One might also be working a job which is going well and be successful in one’s company, but still wonder whether one is doing what one ought to. Then career satisfaction might be high,

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without one feeling that one is successful. In other words, career satisfaction might be one, but only one, measure for subjective career success. Moreover it misses the fact that success and notions of success vary greatly from one individual to another: as we have seen, different cultures look at success differently, as do men and women. Some people draw primarily on self-referent criteria in order to assess their career success, while others look mainly to others when they evaluate how successful they have been. Finally, it is not only work which affects our career, but many other predictors, last not least the rest of one’s life. We therefore propose the following way of understanding objective and subjective career success (see Figure 1). Objective career success is primarily made up of objective factors such as income and advancement i.e. position in the organization. Subjective career success is composed of job satisfaction, career satisfaction and life satisfaction. Those three are in turn influenced- and can also be made operational- by job climate and job vcariety, control and skill use, opportunities for development, work-life balance, and the sense of fulfilling ones vocation. Depending on the individual and the particular job different ones of those factors will play more or less, and we shall see when we look at careers in NFPOs for example. In the following section, we will examine the process of how an individual arrives at her particular concept of career success and what are the factors influencing this process. By seeking to dissect career success conceptualization into its constituent parts we will be able to explain variances in outcomes, most notably for managers in NFPOs.

Objective Career Success

Subjective Career Success

Life Satisfaction

Vocation fulfilled

Work-Life Balance

Job Satisfaction

Climate, Variety etc.

Control, Skill Use

Career Satisfaction

Development

Income

Figure 1: Subjective and Objective Career Sucess

Advancement

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A COGNITIVE CAREER SUCCESS MODEL Theoretical foundations In seeking to construct a model of career-success construction, we shall have recourse to social cognitive theory. This theory, especially in its articulation by Bandura (Bandura, 1999) answers one of the crucial question of career theory, namely whether careers are being “suffered” or “enacted”: it posits that “psychological functioning, in fact, involves a continuous reciprocal interaction between behavior and its controlling conditions. Although actions are regulated by their consequences, the controlling environment is, in turn, often significantly altered by the behavior (Bandura, 1969:46). Human beings are not just conditioned, but they are a combination of motivation, emotions and thought processes. So human behavior is not only regulated by external outcomes, else human beings would be like weathervanes. Rather human functioning is directed by the interplay of self-generated and external sources of influence (Bandura, 1991:249)). This can be summarized through the term of triadic reciprocity [Bandura, 1999 #366]: the person and his internal make-up, the environment and human behaviour stand in a dynamic relationship, where each element is affecting the other two. While human beings are, of course, subject to constraints as far as their careers are concerned, they are not victims, nor simply reactors to what their professional lives throw at them. Rather, they have an active role to play in interpreting their career experiences and in responding to them (Bandura, 1982). This also means that particular success is not simply what the organization says it is, nor can it be simply judged by the standards of the organization, society or peers; rather, it needs to be interpreted according to internalized standards. This means that career success has a lot do with values, standards, and also one’s personality (Dweck, 1999; Frieze, Moss, & Olson, 1991; Judge, Higgins, Thoresen, & Barrick, 1999) In order to now answer the question how, in this triadic interplay the individual arrives at his personal construction of multi-facetted career success, we will have recourse to some parts of motivational theory, most notably social cognitive motivational theory, This theory states that “human self-motivation relies on discrepancy production as well as discrepancy reduction. It requires feedforward control as well as feedback control”. It also posits that human beings can anticipate, that is why a future event motivates them. Via symbolic representation future consequences are turned into present motivators.. Furthermore human behaviour is basically self-regulation and self-influence - people respond more to aggregate consequences, and are more influenced by anticipated consequences(Bandura, 1986:13). In other words, according to social cognitive theory, career success will be shaped and impacted by a number of regulatory loops, and we shall identify four of them. First by goal setting and how goals affect self-efficacy and performance; next by attribution as the valuation of activities; thirdly by social comparison; and fourthly by equity considerations i.e. judgements of how fair a particular reward is.

Basic model The starting point for our model is Katzell’s model of the motivational process (Katzell & Thompson, 1990)).At its heart lies a “core process” of 6 variables: Rewards, which also serve as incentives in their anticipated form inasmuch as human beings are able to foresee and to be

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motivated by the cognitive representation of the future. Thus his personality is affected, most notably by his self-efficacy either being increased or decreased, depending on how positive the rewards. How strong the impact is will amongst other depend on the person’s implicit personality theory i.e. whether or not he thinks his personality is changeable or not. In other words career aspirations, what an individual expects out of life, and how confident he is about what he can achieve will shape his attitudes toward life in general, and toward his work in particular. These affect personality, its self-efficacy and confidence, which in turn shape the individual’s attitudes toward the job; these in turn affect the goals which he/she then sets, and the effort exerted in reaching those goals. This effort then leads to a particular achievement. Every achievement (or failure) carries with it particular rewards, i.e., stimuli emanating from the work environment. Some of them are contingent (i.e., they are directly related to the particular achievement) while others are non-contingent (i.e., linked with the particular job). These outcomes of work influence human behaviour in two ways: on the one hand, they serve as the outcome of a particular job, and are part of the feedback which the work environment gives to the individual about his work. But inasmuch as human beings are able to foresee and to be motivated by the cognitive representation of the future, they serve as incentives or disincentives. Rewards can be extrinsic, i.e., administered by someone other than the employee himself: this would include praise, financial gifts or promotions. But some rewards are intrinsic, i.e., rewards arising from the job itself, how interesting it is, what it does for the individual, etc. As we will see in the later discussion, such intrinsic rewards are of particular importance in NFPOs.

But if we seek to explain career success, and not simply a one-off work achievement, we need to expand the model by one more variable. If we think of career success as the composite evaluation of the all the rewards of a career, then rewards affect career success, which in turn feeds back to personality. But it is evident that these factors alone do not suffice to explain all there is to motivational processes. What goals one sets depends as well on the environment one works in: this includes job design, management policies, resources provided by the organization, organizational culture, development programs and the like. So the environment plays directly into the types of rewards which are being offered, and also affects the goal setting process through the norms which it sets and perpetuates. In our case, the particularities of the NFPO career field impact the way we can explain career success in such organizations. Similarly people have expectations about themselves and about others is a key structural concept of social cognitive theory. What goals an individual will set will therefore be strongly influenced by his expectations, not only about his own ability, but also about the work situation. Expectancy valence theory even posits that people calculate the probability of different outcomes. We also need to take into consideration that how successful my efforts are in achieving a particular outcome is also strongly influenced by what resources are at my disposal. In the first instance In the first instance, resources consist of a persons’ qualifications, skills and abilities. In other words, what human capital somebody brings to the career will impact his achievement, however that is being measured. But there is also other capital which the individual can potentially have recourse to: social capital, in the form of relationships,

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networks and friends which help him in his advancement; economic capital, with which to pay for further education or throw parties for important friends; and cultural capital such as titles or particular social classes one has grown up in. Different resources are more or less important for different career contexts and for being successful in those contexts. We can now recapitulate. We have seen that how much effort an individual exerts in his work and career, depends significantly on his goals for life and work. These in turn are dependent on his attitudes toward the job, the work environment he works in, and his life in general. But his goals are also influenced by his expectations, i.e. how likely a particular outcome in his mind. Thirdly his goals are influenced by the environment he works in: work climate, company policies and procedures all affect his goal setting, since the environment thus offers incentives or disincentives for him. Finally norms, be they societal, of his company or of his group, shape the way he sets goals. This model can be seen in Figure 2. Personality

Expectations

Environment

Attitude

Goals

Norms

Effort Resources Achievement

Rewards

extrinsic/ intrinsic

Career Success subjective/ objective

Figure 2-The Basic Cognitive Career Success Model A dynamic view So far our model has been largely static, only considering the constituent parts and their logical sequence. But social cognitive theory posits a dynamic interaction between personality, environment and behavioral outcomes: individuals are not trivial machines, but complex beings who process environmental input from past behavior through complex cognitive processes; so career success must then be the outcome of a dynamic process of selfregulation. Applying a more fine-grained analysis against the backdrop of our theoretical framework, we can identify four feedback loops in our model: one for goal setting, one for attribution, one for assessment of equity, and one for social comparison. Hence the dynamic model would look as follows (see Figure 3)

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Personality Expectations

Environment

Attitude

Goals

Norms

Effort Goal Setting

Resources Achievement

Attribution

Equity

Social Comparison

Rewards extrinsic/ intrinsic

Career Success subjective/ objective

Figure 3- The Dynamic Cognitive Career Success Model The goal setting loop Goals play an important role in the self-regulatory system of social cognitive theory. Human behaviour reveals goal-directedness, in the sense that human beings are directed and sustained in their efforts over long periods of time, without any immediate external inducements. This can only be explained by the presence of goals, i.e., cognitive representations of future states of affair, which lead them to order their activities accordingly. But goals do not automatically lead to self-regulation. On the one hand, this depends on the specificity of the goal and its challenging nature; on the other, that feedback is provided. This feedback is given through the achievement. Thus goals are both targets to aim at and standards to evaluate against. Through this process of self-evaluation goals become powerful motivational triggers. In terms of careers, this means that people set career goals, exercise effort and achieve a certain outcome. This outcome feeds back to them a certain level of goal attainment which serves as a basis for future career goals to be set. But any career outcome not only affects goals directly, but also impacts one’s personality, in particular one’s self-efficacy and thus an individual’s expectation how well he will do in the future. Depending on how confident she is, she will set more or less ambitious goals for the next phase of his career. Thus career choices are in part explained by people’s self-efficacy, which itself stems from past career achievements.

The attribution loop Apart from affecting the setting future goals, achievements are also a key information for an individual in assessing how successful he or she is. The question is how this information is

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processed, how the individual makes sense of the this information (Heckhausen, 1991:347): and this is what happens in the second loop in our model, the attribution loop Once faced with an objective achievement, individuals can and do assign different reasons to it: the most fundamental choice would be to decide whether the cause is internal i.e. linked to the individual, or external and thus to the environment (Fösterling & Stiensmeier-Pelzer, 1984; Goethals & Klein, 2000)Secondly one needs to decide whether these reasons, whether internal or external, are controllable. Thirdly one needs to ascertain whether these causes are stable or whether they will change. Empirical evidence shows that how an individual interprets the reasons for his achievement significantly impacts his selfefficacy and his confidence to embark upon similar or other projects: the more I feel that my achievement is due to causes outside of my control, the less confidence I will have; on the other hand the more I think that what I achieved is due to my own skills and not just luck, the greater a boost to my self-efficacy. But the reverse can also be observed (Witt, Broach, Hilton, & Hellman, 1995; Wright Kassner, 1990; Zuckerman, 1979): depending on my personality, most notably my selfefficacy and my affectivity, I will attribute positive and negative outcomes differently. So the confident will assume that when he fails it is because of external causes and he succeeds the reasons are internal, whereas the depressive personality will do the opposite. So we see a loop forming, with achievements impacting personality, but personality also affecting how achievements are being attributed. Over the span of careers the process of attribution has powerful effects, for what people make out of their successes and failures will affect future successes and failures (Dweck, 1999:140). In other words it is not only important how a particular achievement is viewed in a specific work-context; at least as important is the cognitive process the individual goes through in attributing its causes. In so doing he begins to construct career success. How he does so will depend on a number of factors: what is his implicit personality theory i.e. does he think that his personality can change over time? Internal causes for failure will less likely lead to new attempts to learn, and rather to “learned helplessness”. A second question would be a person’s affectivity: realists will attribute success and failure differently from depressed or optimistic types. And it is the case that many people have recourse to “self-serving attributions” when they evaluate achievements (Goethals et al., 2000) in order to reduce cognitive dissonance. Not only does the attribution process for career achievement vary according to personality, empirical evidence also points to differences depending on professions (Zuckerman, 1979): some are more prone to self-serving attributions than others. Similarly duration of management tenure affects attributions (Schwenk, 1993), as does gender (Frieze et al., 1991). For NFPOs this will raise the question whether they either attract particular personalities or constitute work environments which will affect the attribution process in one particular direction. The equity loop Due to their self-reflective nature individuals evaluate the rewards which their achievements have yielded. One of the aspects they consider is the equity of their reward. To do so the individual does look at the relationship between his effort and his reward; but more importantly he looks at that ratio in comparison that of others. Equity would be achieved, not

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when rewards are the same (that would be equality), but when these ratios are the same (Adams, 1965; Blau, 1986; Homans, 1974). If equity is not achieved, then equity theory predicts that the individual would seek to relieve distress by restoring equity, either by changing his effort or by seeking to have the reward changed. De facto such changes occur depending on how equity sensitive an individual is (Huseman, Hatfield, & Miles, 1987) What equity theory has formulated in general applies also to people’s evaluation of their job and career rewards: they ask themselves whether they are being fairly treated both in terms of salary, but also in terms of other rewards and costs of the job. If they are not, whether they react depends in good part on their personality. If they do react, they have the following options: o Adjusting input or output: one might “pull up one’s socks” and push harder, or begin to coast in the organization, depending on the ratio of input/output. o Distorting inputs or outputs cognitively: this is the classic post-facto rationalization in order to reduce cognitive dissonance. o Changing the field of comparison: from social comparison theory, we learn that whom we pick as a reference group depends a lot on what we are looking for from the comparison. This means that, when a person thinks that his rewards are not what they should be, he might well compare himself with others who are worse off and thus feel significantly better and more successful about his career. We will consider this more fully in the following section. o Leaving the field: this will mean a career change in order to find a more equitable situation. We thus have a third loop in our model, that of equity consideration: a reward is evaluated along equity considerations, and depending on the individual personality, the outcome of this evaluation will impact attitudes and behaviors for the future. For the non-profit sector which we are considering, the two interesting questions will of course be how equity sensitive NFPO managers are, and how much post-facto rationalization occurs to justify being poorly rewarded. The social comparison loop Social comparison is a key element of self-regulation: when an individual does not have access to objective information to evaluate himself, he will have recourse to temporal or interpersonal comparisons. Social comparison theory posits that one will compare oneself to somebody of similar traits or ability. Who one de facto chooses as a reference point for comparison seems to largely depend on one’s aim through the comparison. If it is to gain accurate feedback, the reference person will be very similar; but if it is to enhance one’s selfworth, people will have recourse to downward social comparison. This will sometimes even lead to comparison with imaginary reference groups just feel personally validated [Goethals, 2000 #817]. Social learning theory would hold that social comparison plays a vital role in selfregulation: social comparison provides feedback for the self-appraisal of capabilities. In other words, through comparison with others, be it with their performance or with the rewards they reap, one can rank himself in relation to the rest of his reference group. This in turn impacts his self-efficacy: if he is doing better, his self-efficacy will increase; if worse, his self-efficacy decreases.

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It seems evident that social comparison also plays its role in career success considerations. As we have seen earlier, success depends on intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. As far as extrinsic rewards are concerned, in order to attribute a subjective value to them, one would need some benchmark to ascertain where this puts him in the ranking with his reference group. What salaries are others making? When did they get their last promotion? How central is so-and-so to the organization? As Bandura puts it, for an employee the magnitude of the incentive effect … depends on the ratio of rewards to attainments for that employee compared with the equivalent ratio for other employees (Bandura & Jourden, 1991:946). Hence, extrinsic rewards will not only be evaluated against what one hoped for or how he liked them, but also against what rewards other members of his reference group have received. This was in part already covered in our reflections about equity. But social comparison also applies to intrinsic rewards. There one also compares himself with others in order to ask how fulfilled they are in their work, or how much they get out of their work. Depending on whether the judgement is positive or negative, career satisfaction will either go up or down. In other words, social comparison impacts satisfaction and thus career success. This begs the question what social reference group an individual seeks when engaging in social comparison. Applying Suls insight to careers, those who seek accurate feedback about their career performance will look to others with similar jobs and careers; those who want a boost, will look to a reference group less fortunate them; and those still climbing and looking for inspiration compare themselves with others who are more successful. Such behaviour is most likely influenced by affectivity and personality: optimists and those with high selfefficacy will have less reason to engage in constructive social comparison than those who are already dissatisfied and discouraged with their careers; thus we see that social comparison and personality and attitudes form a virtuous (or vicious) cycle. We can also observe that the process of social comparison varies according to age (Suls & Mullen, 1982): at a young age, most comparison is temporal and self-referent. At about eight human beings get interested in competing with others, and thus turn more other-referent. When middle age strikes, one begins to re-evaluate one’s life work and tends to see as similar even individuals who are very different in related attributes. And in old age, one withdraws all together from interpersonal comparison. Hence we have a fourth and final loop in our Cognitive Career Success Model, and that is the social comparison loop: I consider my job and career rewards and then choose a particular person to compare myself to. This leads to particular judgements, depending again on my personality, which in turn will affect subsequent career behavior. There is a final factor in the social comparison process, and that is the choice of professional reference group. Even confident individuals who are interested in realistic feedback have a choice as regards the group they compare themselves and their career with: is it people in the same firm, is it people of the same grade in another firm in the same industry, or is it somebody in a different sector altogether. It is evident that who one chooses to compare oneself with does significantly impact one’s level of satisfaction and success. This will raise the question of who the social reference group is for NFPO managers.

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DISCUSSION AND APPLICATION We have so far considered a general model for the conceptualization of career success which allows us to analyze the process and consider which factors influence it. But one of our questions in this paper is what makes Cinderella come to the ball and dance: in other words, what “makes managers in NFPOs tick” and does their concept of career success differ in any way from profit making firm (PMF) managers? We will therefore consider the different constructs of our model and its four loops and ask where specificities of NFPOs could lie. Evidently we will not argue that everything is different in the NFPO world; it is more a matter of emphasis, but even so the comparison will yield some interesting findings. We will then enumerate possible applications which this model points to; first in the area of research, and then for the practice of HR and general NFPO management. - Constructs One of the most fundamental questions to ask when applying our CCS-model to NFPO managers is whether the sector attracts a different type of personality. Unfortunately empirical evidence is reasonably scarce (except (Meyer, Aghamanoukjan, Eikhof, & Leitner, 2006; Pearce, 1993; Rawls et al., 1975; Stein, 2002), so some of our analysis will need to be slightly conjectural. One personality trait which strikes us as relevant is what could be called the degree of collective mentality. Cross-cultural studies have long observed that different countries or cultural environments score differently on the individualism-collectivism spectrum. This manifests itself in behaviour which is more or less selfish, in different abilities to work together, but also in opposing ways that people conceive of their own identity: individuals from more collective cultures will describe themselves more typically through relational attributes (“I am the son of so-and-so”, “my people live in that place”, etc.), whereas people from more individualistic cultures will more likely point to their achievements to describe who they are. Trafimow et al. thus speaks of the private and the collective self. Field experiments comparing managers in Israeli cities and in kibbutzim have also lent support to this basic distinction: contributing to the attainment of group goals was significantly more valued by those for whom the collective self (Erez calls it “interdependent self”) is more prevalent than by those whose private self is more at play. This raises the question whether there is any evidence that NFPO managers would display more of a collective self than those of PMFs. We saw earlier that one characteristic features of NFPOs is their orientation around a cause, the pursuit of a purpose. Success for them as an organization is not measured by profit, but by the accomplishment of a mission. Applying to Holland’s congruence theory to such organizations, it stands to reason that NFPOs would attract individuals for whom the attainment of group goals is more important than the pursuit of their personal agenda. There are a few indications that point to particular characteristics of the NFPO workforce. One is the salary levels in NFPOs, and voluntary wage restraint. This can at least potentially shield the organization from profit-maximizers. Secondly, by definition, NFPOs have a certain number of volunteers as part of their workforce, for whom success cannot be evaluated in terms of money since they do not make any. But this in turn has a knock-on effect on the organizational climate of such organizations, both through the culture that it creates, and

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because a number of managers are former volunteers. All this would indicate that NFPO managers will be more intrinsically motivated. The counter-argument would hold that power is at work in any organization and serves as strong motivator for individuals; if anything, organizations where money plays less of a role might be more prone to power mongering and jockeying for position. Ultimately this question still awaits empirical testing, for instance with the Work preference inventory of Amabile et al.. But we would agree with some authors that NFPOs managerial workforce will tend to be more intrinsically motivated. This also means that they conceptualise their career success with a greater emphasis on psychological success. Is there any indication that NFPO managers are more altruistic than their PMF counterparts? This seems to be at least the popular notion about people serving in NFPOs: selfless, full of good will, giving of themselves for the sake of others (Colby, 1992). But we must remember that not all prosocial behaviour is altruistic: sometimes people help others to avoid emotional distress and to avoid feelings of guilt. Even volunteers, often seen as the prime example of altruism, display a whole mix of motives. They want to help, but often they also want to make new friends, feel needed or be able to put volunteering on their CV. Finally there are NFPOs, for example in the arts sector, where the goal seems to be more to promote one’s own person than to help others. So we could not say that all NFPO activity requires or even encourages altruism. On the other hand, a lot of not-for-profit behaviour cannot be explained except by a motive of genuine altruism, a desire to seek somebody else’s welfare above one’s own: looking after the terminally ill, feeding the homeless or visiting prisoners are examples of behaviour which requires genuine altruism, at least in part. And indeed, priests, social workers and teachers do score higher on Super’s Work Value Inventory in the altruism category. This would mean that at least in some parts of the NFPO sector, altruism is more prevalent: organizations positively select for such people, and their corporate culture socializes their members into it. In his revision of the work on career anchors, Schein stated that “service for a cause” is a genuine anchor for some people. NFPOs seem to be places where such a service altruism can be lived out, as is manifests when people get asked why they moved from PMFs to NFPOs: being able to “make a difference” is often mentioned. This would make us believe that altruistic inclination will be higher in the NFPO workforce than in the rest of the population. So it would be silly and unrealistic to think that people in NFPOs are all altruists, and that the only rewards they are looking for are intrinsic. So can we expect that career rewards are any different for NFPO managers than for their counterparts in the for-profit sector? It seems that NFPOs have less money that they can freely spend. Anecdotal evidence would support such a view, although the literature is less unanimous about that. Also, when people in NFPOs are asked why they changed from PMFs to NFPOs, it is rare that extrinsic rewards play a big role: making a difference and working with people who love what they are doing are much more often cited as reasons. On the other hand, motivational theory proves clearly that all of us are motivated by a wide range of rewards: even managers of stock broking firms are concerned with work-life balance, and NFPO managers appreciate being able to buy a new car. This means that both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards are important in the NFPO world as well. But we would expect that intrinsic rewards play a bigger role there than they do in NFPOs.

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The phenomenon of crowding-out is also worth mentioning here. Most people no longer believe that any form of extrinsic rewards would crowd out intrinsic motivation. But evidence is still strong that crowding out pertains in two particular situations, both very relevant in NFPO contexts. The first is when one rewards people extrinsically for doing unpleasant jobs. The second has to do with situations where goals are vague, multiple tasks are expected and performance is hard to measure. In all these cases extrinsic rewards are also problematic because they tend to encourage employees to do what gets rewarded and to neglect the rest. Bellah argued that one can distinguish people and their relationship to work along three categories: those who have jobs, those who have “careers” 2 , and those who have callings. The first group approaches work as a means to an end, namely, to acquire the resources they need to enjoy life; if, for example, they were to win the lottery tomorrow, they would drop their job immediately. Those with a career are invested in their work, not only for financial reward, but also for advancement, power and self-esteem. Finally, those with a calling are those who find their work inseparable from their life. Wrzezniewski et al. researched this tripartite distinction job/calling/vocation empirically, and arrived at the following conclusions: 1. All people are able rather easily to put themselves into one of those three categories. 2. While some occupations are more apt to attract people from one category, all three dimensions will be represented in all occupations. 3. Subjective career success will be more dependent on how an employee sees his or her work than on income or occupational prestige. This indicates that, depending on one’s view of work, one’s conceptualization of career success will be different. But calling and vocation are not limited to artists. Tim Hall has increasingly called for a conceptualization of career as a “path with a heart”, where the subjective career takes precedence over the objective one, and success is conceptualized more along the lines of a calling. Weiss, Skelley, Hall and Haughey define calling as follows: o Work is consciously viewed as a calling, to which one chooses to respond. o Work serves the community and not just oneself or one’s family· o Deciding to embark upon that call involves discernment (listening, reflection, prayer) to know the right path. o It involves discovering one’s “daimon”, i.e., the quintessential self or “genius”. o One uses one’s gifts (charisms) as manifestation of the Spirit for the “common good”. So people’s approach to their jobs vary and with it the way they conceptualize career success. For some, their identity is much more wrapped up with their job, and they would express it as having a call or a vocation. Secondly this intense orientation toward work is not limited to classic “vocations”, such as priests, missionaries or artists. In Wrzesniewski et al.s

2 We realize that here the term “career” is used slightly differently, since according to our definition earlier, all three categories of people have a career.

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study administrative assistants in colleges also displayed behaviours typical for somebody with a “vocation”. So is there any evidence that managers in NFPOs would be more likely to approach their work as calling? On one hand, the intense identification with one’s work, which will lead one to do the job even if one were not paid, is quite typical for NFPO jobs: even the use of the term “mission” quite often indicates that such people find it hard to distinguish work and the rest of life. Many NFPOs make use of this feature by asking employees to work pro bono for a while before they get a contract. But as Hall and others indicate, not only NFPO careers can and should be approached as vocation. They advocate the “calling” concept as a way to look at all employment, in part to deal with the changing nature of career: psychological career conceptualization will reframe the success discussion as careers become more boundaryless and thus less tied to an organization. So there does not seem any reason why NFPO managers would be special in that regard. As with many other constructs, only empirical testing will shed further clarity on our question. Dobrow has developed a calling construct and tested it on musicians. It showed remarkable validity and ability to predict career behaviour among young musicians. But when we consider NFPOs, especially value-driven ones, we have already seen that a number of conditions obtain: greater intrinsic motivation, more communally conceptualized career success and greater congruence of personal and organizational values. It seems likely, in relative terms, that while a vocation-orientation is not unique to NFPO managers, it will be more frequent in that occupational group. - Processes & Loops A priori the goal setting process does not seem much different for managers of NFPOs and PMFs. But if our preceding predictions hold true, then some aspects will be more pronounced. If the collective self is more developed for NFPO managers, then the norms of the organization will play a bigger role as he formulates personal career goals. This greater goal congruence should also lead to more alignment between what he pursues and what the organization wants: this will lead to greater subjective career success. Attributions of career achievements will mainly depend on career self-efficacy. There is no reason to believe that self-efficacy is higher for NFPO managers than for their PMF equivalents in general. However, Wright Kassner found differences in attribution patterns across Holland’s occupational categories: people in Artistic and Social occupational groups attributed their achievement most to other’s unstable efforts, people in the Investigative group least. Similarly luck attributions were made most by people in the Conventional category, and least in the Investigative one. Since both luck and other’s unstable effort are both external causes, and external cause attribution reveals lower self-esteem, Wright Kassner interprets these results as Artistic, Social and Conventional occupational groups being lower in selfesteem than the Investigative one. While this has repercussions on career success, it does not map neatly onto the NFPO-PMF divide: Holland’s occupational types can be found in both sectors. There is also some empirical evidence that the longer one’s tenure, either as a CEO or as a member of the management team, the more one is inclined toward self-serving attributions when it comes to interpreting success and failure. This means that managers with more

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experience in a company will take credit for positive outcomes and lay the blame on the environment for negative outcomes. Other factors play a role as well: how central one’s position is in an organization, what role one plays in that organization, the size of the organization, among others. But since the average the average tenure of managers in NFPOs is shorter than in PMFs, and if our view of greater development of the collective self amongst NFPO managers hold, then it stands to reason that self-serving attributions will be less likely in NFPOs. Another phenomenon has been observed in teacher-student and therapist-client settings: in both cases there was very little evidence for self-serving attribution, in other words teachers and therapists rarely took credit for professional achievements in their work with their clients. One of the most convincing explanations for this behaviour is their strong identification with those they work with, thus wanting them to take more of the credit for any progress made. While more evidence is needed to confirm this explanation, it would be another indication for managers in NFPOs being more reluctant to make self-serving attributions. We observed earlier that individuals evaluate their rewards and assess whether or not those rewards are commensurate with their input. If not, they experience distress and change their input. But not all human beings are equally equity-sensitive. This means that one’s reaction to over- or underpayment, or more largely to inequitable treatment, varies significantly. Equity-sensitives are those who will experience distress both when over- and underrewarded and will seek to alleviate the situation. Entitleds are those who have a high threshold for being indebted, and thus do not mind being overrewarded – their job satisfaction will not suffer. The third group are the Benevolents, who think more of giving than receiving. They do not mind giving more than they receive in return. They do not behave like profitmaximizers, but are satisfied when they put more in than they get out. This trait can be measured, and the equity sensitivity index has proven to be a reliable measure and predictor for work behaviour. But is there evidence that the distribution of Equity sensitives, Benevolents and Entitleds is different in PMFs and NFPOs? An immediate reaction would see altruists as Benevolents. So if our earlier prediction holds true, then NFPOs will have as many Benevolents as it has altruists. But for one what seems like altruism can be just pro-social behaviour, thus not all selfless. In that case the input/output ratio of that person might be different, and he no longer qualifies as a benevolent. So not every apparent altruist is a Benevolent. Conversely, not every Benevolent is an altruist: equity theory does not say anything about the reasons for not minding “drawing the short straw”. Is it genuine charity? Is it the need to look good? Or is it the helper’s syndrome which makes them like to be needed and taken advantage of. So there is no immediate indication that NFPO managers are less equity sensitive than PMF counterparts; however there are definitely professions within the NFPO sector, such as nurses, doctors, social workers, where Benevolents will be more frequent than in the rest of the population and hence self-exploitation is more frequent.

Social comparison theory posits that To the extent that objective, non-social means are not available, people evaluate their opinions and abilities by comparison respectively with the opinions and abilities of others. (Festinger, 1954:118)

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We have already seen that one of the challenges of NFPOs is the fact that objective means of evaluation both organizational and personal performance are difficult to find, therefore social comparison will play an important role in career success construction for NFPO managers. We have said earlier that this comparison takes place with people of similar ability and trait, provided one wishes to have accurate feedback about oneself and not simply enhancement of self-worth; otherwise one would seek a group worse off. If one were looking for a challenge, one would be looking for a more highly successful reference group. In general there is no reason why this process should be functioning any differently for NFPO managers. As their careers yield certain rewards, they look to others to see how they are faring- obviously the more so the more other-referent they are in their success conceptualization. If they want accurate feedback, then their reference group will be people as similar to them as possible. Assuming that they display the characteristics discussed earlier, i.e. intrinsic motivation, altruistic inclinations, strongly developed collective self, then their reference group is likely to be the non-profit sector or a subgroup thereof. The less they display those characteristics, the more they will gravitate toward comparing themselves with managers in the PMFs. Accordingly career success conceptualization will vary. There also appears to be a phenomenon that the more a particular profession is stigmatized, either because the work is “dirty” or because it involves servile, humiliating or repulsive tasks, the more selective social comparison starts to operate. Thus undertakers, exterminators or morgue attendants find ideologies to create self-validation where society withholds that. In return, they build strong inter-group identity and develop strong occupational cultures which provide self-esteem and support. Clearly not all NFPO managers find themselves in such situations. But for those who do what in the eyes of their PMF-peers seems crazy, a similar selective social comparison takes place: drug rehabilitation workers identifying more strongly with their clients than with the police or firefighters and relief workers delighting in the hardships of their assignments. By doing so, career success gets reframed. - Applications research In light of some of the differences which seem apparent when applying the CCS model to NFPO, we wonder whether this does not point to a few fruitful avenues for further research. The first has to do with the relationship between the objective and subjective elements of career success. There are also a number of characteristics in NFPOs directly relevant for career success. One can mention the composition of the work force in terms of the motivational and aspirational profiles of individuals working in NFPOs, e.g. employees who are idealistic and loyal to a cause, in terms of valued career outputs and in terms of evaluation criteria for career success. In addition, the requirements for new jobs in NFPOs are often adhoc and are highly diverse. This suggests that NFPOs provide a more protean context, wherein individuals need to conceptualise their career success more personally and subjectively. Might it not be the case that for NFPO managers, career success will be conceptualized more subjectively and objective career success will be less relevant?

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Similarly, while both extrinsic and intrinsic rewards are sought after and needed in NFPOs as well, the use of extrinsic rewards will more like undermine subjective career success. Finally the more a NFPO manager is intrinsically motivated the more he will be inclined to choose other NFPO managers as his reference group for social comparison. The second avenue has to do with the concept of one’s job and career in NFPOs per se. We have seen that NFPO managers will tend to be more intrinsically motivated and altruistically inclined, and the will display greater communal self traits than their PMF counterparts, hence might we say that they will have the expression of altruism as a more frequent determinant of their career success? Will service for a cause not be a more frequent career anchor for them? Will goal congruence between their organization and themselves not be a major determinant of their career success? And finally will NFPO managers not consider their career more frequently a calling? Attribution of achievements does not differ greatly between NFPO- and PMF-managers. However, some subgroups seem to be less likely to attribute positive achievements internally: on one hand people with a Social occupational orientation according to Holland are more likely to attribute to external causes, and seem to score lower on self-esteem and self-efficacy tests. Secondly people working with clients and needy people are similarly reluctant to attribute achievements to personal causes. But such external attributions lower self-efficacy, and in turn subjective career success. Thus some groups amongst NFPO managers are prone to lowered subjective career success, both compared to PMF managers, but also compared to other NFPO managers. Hence the more managers in NFPOs are active in social and helping contexts, the likelier that they attribute achievements externally, and thus the lower their subjective career success. Also if a profession is unpopular, stigmatised or prone to low image, the likelier that people working in such professions will engage in reframing through selective social comparison. Helping NFPOs are often active in such work. This then leads to such people chosing new reference groups when they construct their career success. We can therefore assume that similar mechanisms take place in NFPOs as well. Hence the more a NFPO manager works in a field which is socially stigmatised, the more his career success will chose new and unusual reference groups for his reward evaluation.

practice For the area of practice, there are also a number of implications worth pursuing. The first is the pay for performance practice which is becoming increasingly common as professionalization of NFPOs advances. While not to be condemned, its implementation is at least problematic, both in terms of how it affects career success of managers and in how effective it actually is. Secondly we see a potential tension between the importance of values, mission and calling for some NFPOs on the one side, and the functional adequacy of a particular individual on the other. In recruitment, professional standards and qualifications become increasingly important, but it remains to see whether organizations are not running the risk of inadvertantly filtering out their most “idealistic” prospects.

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A third possible area of challenge is in goal setting and performance appraisals of NFPO managers. If success is more subjectively conceptualized, how can it be measured? The whole area of recruitment and retaining of employees needs to take into consideration the various reference groups that NFPO managers choose. It cannot always be assumed that they compare themselves with PMF managers. Hence organizations will need to offer tailored solutions if they want to survive in an increasingly competitive field. In other words, as we understand career success in NFPOs better, it is likely that HR and management practice will have to undergo some revision.

CONCLUDING REMARKS We set out asking ourselves why Cinderella was going to the ball, and what made her different. For that we first looked at all the dancers at the party in order to understand in general what “makes people tick” what they are hoping to get out of the evening. We then compared our general findings with Cinderella, and saw that she was similar and different at the same time. While NFPO managers display- not surprisingly- very human traits, some of their aspirations differ in emphasis. While they don’t just dance “for the sake of it”, the subjective component of the success conceptualization seems more pronounced. This has shown us avenues for futher research, but also how to adapt current NFPO management practice. And in the process we discovered that Cinderella had actually something to offer at the ball.

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