Information system personnel career anchor changes leading to career changes

Abstract

Career anchors represent personal desires of employees that must be satisfied in order for organizations to attract and retain good workers. Career stages represent advancements along the paths of employment that an individual can take through an organization or chain of organizations that represent professional growth and increased value to an organization. Though research is prevalent on career anchors and career stage models, works that look at changes in one as the other changes are missing from the literature. Due to that lack, it is usually concluded that anchors reflect changes in careers as Information systems (IS) employees advance through their career stages. However, expectancy-value theory leads us to expect that the causality may be reversed, that career anchors change leading employees to value alternative positions more highly. Drawing on the career changes of 10 IS employees, we examine the changes in anchors through progressive career stages. While technical competence and security anchors are important at all stages of an IS career, managerial competence, geographic security, and autonomy become more important in the latter stages and are often adjusted prior to career movement. Management should account for these changes while designing jobs and incentives, while further research is required to confirm dominant patterns of change.

Keywords:

• career anchors
• career stages
• IS personnel

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christina Ling-Hsing Chang

About the Authors

Christina Ling-Hsing Chang is Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Management, National Pingtung Institute of Commerce in Taiwan ROC. She completed her Ph.D. at the Department of Information Management of Sun Yat-Sen University. Her research areas include MIS and organizational behavior, the power and political behavior of the IT development process, the relation between culture and IT development, the career anchors and management of IS personnel, Information Ethics, qualitative methodology, and knowledge management. She has had research papers published in Behavior & Information Technology, International Journal of Information Management, Information Research: an International Electronic Journal, Human Systems Management, the Journal of Information Ethics, the International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management, among others, and at many international conferences. She has also been a co-editor of a special issue of International Journal of Electronic Business (2007, Vol. 5, No. 5).

Victor Chen

Jengchung Victor Chen (Ph.D. in CIS, University of Hawaii) is an Associate Professor in the Institute of International Management at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Taiwan. Dr. Chen’s research interests are Information Ethics, Project Management, IS Service Quality, and Electronic Commerce and has published in journals such as Information & Management, Decision Support Systems, Cyber Psychology & Behavior, and the Journal of Database Management. He served as the Program Chair for the Twenty-First International Conference for Pacific Rim Management and is President – Elect of the Association for Chinese Management Educators (ACME) 2011–2012. He is also the President of the International Chinese Information Systems Association 2011–2012. At present he is the Director of International Relations in the Office of International Affairs at NCKU.

Gary Klein

Gary Klein is the Couger Professor of Information Systems at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. He obtained his Ph.D. in Management Science from Purdue University. Before that time, he served with the company now known as Accenture in Kansas City, and was director of the Information Systems Department for a regional financial institution. His research interests include project management, technology transfer, and mathematical modeling with over 150 academic publications in these areas. He teaches programming, project management, and statistics. He served as Director of Education for the American Society for the Advancement of Project Management, is a Fellow of the Decision Sciences Institute, and is an active member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the Association of Information Systems, and the Project Management Institute. He serves as on the editorial board of the International Journal of Information Technology Project Management and the Journal of the Association of Information Systems, as an Assistant Editor for MIS Quarterly, and as Senior Editor for the Pacific Asia Journal of the Association of Information Systems.

James J Jiang

James J. Jiang is the distinguished Professor of Information Systems in the Research School of Business and School of Accounting and Business Information Systems of the Australian National University (ANU), Australia. He received his Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from the University of Cincinnati. Currently, he is also an honorary distinguished Chair Professor of Management, National Taiwan University, Taiwan. Before joining ANU, he was in academic positions in the U.S. Professor Jiang’s research interests are IS Project/Program Management and Service Quality. He has published over 150 academic journal articles on these and other topics. He serves on the editorial boards of the Information Resources Management Journal, the International Journal of IT Project Management, Information & Management, and MIS Quarterly.