Do They Pursue the Same? A Cross-culture Research on Career Anchor of IT/IS Personnel

While career anchor has been mainly studied in US society; this study extends research to Chinese cultural context to investigate the implications of career anchor in terms of job/career satisfaction and subsequent turnover intention among information technology/information systems (IT/IS) personnel in Taiwan and United Arab Emirates (UAE) societies. Chinese guanxi culture could be plays key roles in shaping career anchor and in affecting employees\u27 assessing their job/career and turnover decision. A survey study will be used for conducted to validate the hypotheses and compare the different with Taiwan and UAE two societies

Strategies for Reducing High Turnover Among Information Technology Professionals

Organizations globally are spending millions of dollars replacing information technology (IT) professionals. IT professionals, who possess technical skills and competencies that interconnect business processes, are costly to replace. There are direct and indirect costs associated when an IT professional leaves, such as advertising fees, headhunting fees, and project delays. Lacking a firm understanding of the reasons why IT professionals leave their positions, many business leaders do not have strategies for reducing turnover rates. Building on Herzberg\u27s motivation-hygiene theory and March and Simon\u27s process model of turnover, this exploratory multiple case study sought to identify the strategies that business leaders view as essential for retaining IT professionals. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 10 IT managers in the Houston, Texas, area; participants were selected using a purposive sampling technique. Thematic analysis revealed eight strategies for addressing turnover: compensation, opportunity and advancement, rewards and recognition, relationship with the supervisor and coworkers, training and development, communications, meaningful work, and flexible work schedule. Findings from this study may contribute to positive social change by providing business leaders with more insight about how they can retain IT professionals. The high turnover among IT professionals affects individuals, families, communities, organizations, and the economy. Implementing strategies to reduce turnover rates can help keep individual employees and their family members together and reduce the unemployment rates

Career anchors and preferences for organizational career management: A study of information technology professionals in three European countries

Careers research has moved beyond the notion of traditional careers in a stable, predictable work environment to a more individual perspective. However, individual agency in career management is still likely to involve interactions between organizations and individuals. This is particularly evident in organizational career management (OCM). Career anchor theory has shed light on the work preferences of professionals but little research has examined relationships between career anchors and how people enact their careers, or how these constructs and their relationships might differ between countries. We report a quantitative study of 1,629 IT professionals from 10 organizations in Switzerland, Germany and the UK. After allowing for control variables, career anchor scores explained statistically significant amounts of variance in preferences for five of the six categories of OCM practices. Some of the connections between career anchors and OCM preferences followed naturally from their content, but others were less self-evident, or even seemingly contradictory. There were some significant differences between nationalities, with the UK tending to be the outlier. These differences were partly but not entirely consistent with prior research. This study expands understanding of the interplay of individual values and OCM and draws on previous work to offer a new classification of OCM practices

Cultural Orientations as Antecedents of Career Anchors: An Exploratory Study

In this study the relationship between cultural dimensions and career anchors was examined. The objective was to uncover whether cultural orientations, measured through cultural dimensions, could be perceived as antecedents of career anchors. Responses from 283 people, distributed over 24 countries and five continents, were collected and a canonical correlation analysis was conducted. Results showed that the relationship between cultural orientations and career anchors could be explained through a smaller set of variables. Specifically, results indicated that the cultural dimensions of uncertainty avoidance and long-term orientation were related to the career anchors of job security/stability and, furthermore, that the cultural dimensions of power distance and masculinity were related to the career anchors of service/dedication to a cause and lifestyle. Theoretically, this study expands on the current career anchors’ theory by focusing on antecedents beyond demographic characteristics such as age, gender, occupation, and personality traits. Practically, this study provides organizations with greater insight into factors affecting employee motivation and engagement

Job satisfaction in hotel employess: a systematic review of the literature

Hotel employees' job satisfaction is very important to their performance. In a systematic review of the previous literature on hotel employees, it was found that the most studied variable was job satisfaction; there were no other systematic reviews on the topic. In this review, performed in the Web of Knowledge, Web of Science (Social Sciences Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, Medline), and Science Direct between 2000 and 2014, 51 studies were found.These studies indicated that satisfaction is crucial to the financial performance and prosperity of hotels and acts a mediator in customer satisfaction. Contributing to greater satisfaction are factors such as greater autonomy and independence, greater power of decision making, flexible schedules, better working conditions, and training. The factors that promote dissatisfaction are wages and reduced benefits. The studies also indicated that a higher level of job satisfaction can have a direct impact on increasing the financial performance of the hotel. The implications of this study for hoteliers and directors relates to the creation of adequate working conditions to increase job satisfaction and provide hotel employees with a greater sense of subjective well-being

Exploring the relationship between self-esteem and career anchors in the financial services industry

This research focused on the relationship between self-esteem and career anchors in the context of career development. The objectives of the study were twofold. The first was to establish the relationship between individuals’ self-esteem (as measured by the Culture Free Self-Esteem Inventory) and career anchors (as measured by the Career Orientations Inventory); and the second was to determine if self-esteem significantly predict career anchors. An online survey was administered to a non-probability, convenience sample (n = 77) of full-time individuals, employed adults at managerial and general staff levels, in the South African financial services industry. The sample consisted of predominantly married (58.4%), white (44.2%), females (57.1%) between the ages 35 and 44 years (32.5%). The Culture Free Self-Esteem Inventory for Adults (CFSEI 2-AD) and Career Orientations Inventory (COI) were used to gather data. Correlational analysis showed an association between the variables of CFSEI 2-AD and COI. A multiple regression analysis supported that self-esteem predict career anchors. Recommendations were suggested for use by human resource professionals to inform the career development of employees in the South African financial service industry.Human Resource ManagementM. Com. (Human Resource Management

A communicative-tension model of change-induced collective voluntary turnover in IT

Losing talented IT employees, the most critical strategic resource in IT, during a major organizational change can be catastrophic to the overall performance of the IS organization. This paper develops a multi-layered communicative-tension model of change-induced collective voluntary turnover from a historical case study analysis. A major organizational change at a healthcare insurance firm’s IT unit reveals the presence of three primary communicative tensions: alignment-autonomy, stability-change and expression-suppression. A group of employees, dissatisfied with the negative communicative practices employed by their managers in the midst of these communicative tensions, left the organization. A communicative-tension model of change-induced collective voluntary turnover complements and extends upon prior collective voluntary turnover research by accounting for the organizational change context and broader relational dynamics. This study offers practitioners important insights on how to manage communicative tensions during an IS organizational change to improve IT talent retention.http//: www.elsevier.com/locate/jsis2017-12-31hb2017Informatic

HRM in Transition: Chinese HR Managers Talk.

This research aims to ascertain how HR managers in China perceive their roles under China's economic transition period from a state-controlled economy to a market economy. There has been a tendency for studies of Chinese HRM to be dominated by survey-based methods and quantitative techniques and whilst these have provided helpful cross-sectional insights they have generally failed to capture how the practice of HRM is experienced from the perspective of Chinese managers themselves. An examination of the literature shows that both in the context of Chinese HRM, and HRM more generally, the lack of detailed qualitative research has left gaps in terms of HR managers' perceptions of their role, most notably in terms of its emotional dimensions (especially important in the Chinese context of guanxi practices) and its status as part of a career pattern. This research therefore adopts an exploratory approach that aims to provide tentative explanations of patterns that emerge from detailed semi-structured interviews with Chinese HR managers (38 managers from 26 diverse companies). Analysis of this data revealed three groups of respondents, defined according to their HR role descriptions: Restricted Functional; Professional Functional; and Strategic Partners. These groups are compared and contrasted in terms of their HR practices, the ways in which they handle emotions, and their career anchors. In each case a distinctive pattern emerges which appears to reflect a complex combination of individual aspirations and structural factors, the latter particularly associated with the hierarchical structure of the organizations concerned and the ways in which power is exercised. The study contributes to knowledge of HRM in six ways: 1. It supports studies that claim ownership may not be the main determining factor in shaping Chinese HRM practices; 2. It shows a tension in the debates about the role of HR managers in relation to employee care and advocacy; 3. It makes a valuable contribution to the role of emotion in HR work; 4. It contributes to showing the significance of guanxi practices within Chinese organizations; 5. The study contributes to the area of HR career development which has been seen to be largely unresearched in any form; 6. Finally, it contributes to knowledge of HRM in China by filling an important gap in the form of the lack of qualitative studies of Chinese managers. By presenting a view of the nature and roles of Chinese HR work through the words of Chinese HR managers themselves, this study presents a body of rich data that provides a very unusual insight into the experiences of a group that has been widely explored from the 'outside' but has been given little opportunity to 'speak for itself

Navigating professional careers in new organisational forms

The notion of professional work is changing from the traditional learned occupations in which an exclusive body of knowledge and access to practice was controlled by a privileged minority. Nowadays, many more vocational groupings enjoy professional status, although the locus of control over standards and behaviours is moving from professional bodies to organisations in which access to, and use of, knowledge is embedded in information systems. Such changes are epitomised by a new organisational form the shared service centre (SSC) where business support functions are aggregated into business process centres so that efficiency and quality of service can be improved through task simplification, automation and the adoption of multidisciplinary process working. A consequence of the new factory-style environment is that work becomes polarised between a small number of senior professional personnel who design and monitor work systems, and the vast majority of workers who perform low-level, transactional tasks. In the hollowed out middle, a career bottleneck develops meaning that workers have little chance of progression and, moreover, the nature of lower level work may not equip them for senior roles potentially dulling aspirations of a long-term professional career. The purpose of this research is to explore the impact of these changes for the careers of finance professionals working in the SSC. Within the careers literature, there is a tendency to explain individual career orientations of today through theories constructed much earlier. For example, Schein s (1978) concept of career anchors aims to provide a stable framework of influence throughout an individual s work life, yet despite changes in organisational and technological landscapes, these original anchors remain unchallenged. This exploratory enquiry gathers data from finance professionals working in SSCs through interviews and an adapted survey instrument based on Schein s career anchor inventory (COI; 1990) to ask how do those working in professional roles in SSCs understand and navigate their careers? The fundamental contributions of this thesis are as follows: 1) theoretically, a classification which provides a novel frame of reference for understanding types of SSC and the work within them; 2) identification of pertinent skills that both guide and potentially enable careers for finance professionals in this context these extend beyond previous suggestions of soft skills into new business skills for global, multidisciplinary and organisationally focused professional work; 3) evidential support for a refreshed approach to career theory, especially for boundary-focused career scholarship (Inkson et al, 2012) and clarification of new dimensions in multidirectional careers (Baruch, 2004); 4) a proposal for a new set of six career anchors that challenge the relevance of old theory in new contexts and provide meaningful insight into the navigation of careers in new organisational forms. This work serves as a founding and original investigation into careers within finance SSCs. There are practical implications for individual career management, the role and relevance of professional accrediting bodies in new contexts, and also for organisational HR strategy and their function in supporting individual skills development for contemporary professionals in new organisational forms

The impact of human resource practices on employee commitment and retention among nurses in Amathole district, South Africa

This study explored the impact of human resource practices on employee commitment and retention among nurses in Amathole District, South Africa. The objectives of this study were to determine the influence of human resources practices (HR) on nurse retention in public hospitals; investigate the influence of HR practices on organizational commitment of nurses, and retention and to make recommendations to the hospitals on possible ways to improve the organisational commitment and employee retention of nurses based on the research findings. The study utilized a quantitative research design and questionnaires were used to collect data. The sample comprised of 150 nurses and the data was analysed through descriptive and inferential statistics. Research findings revealed that the effective use of sound human resources practices reduces nurse turnover whilst nurse organisational commitment and retention improves