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Summary The boundaryless career could be a bane or boon to people's experience of psychological
success. This paper describes the contours of the boundaryless career and then looks
at how workers will have to deal with aging over several career cycles, integrate diverse
experiences into their identities, and come to terms with new types of employer-employee
relationships. This introduces the idea of finding psychological success in one's life
work, encompassing not only a job and an organization, but also work as a spouse,
parent, community member, and as a self-developer.
Introduction
Takatsuki, Japan At 7:00 one Friday evening, when they would usually be dutifully at their
desks, 40 or so executives of Sunstar Corporation stepped into the company's auditorium for the
latest in Japanese employee training: a course in the art of being a family man.
From 'Japan's astounding future: Life with father', Newi York Times, November
12, 1993,p.4.
Washington, D. C. There's just one problem with working for a living: There's no time left
for life.
From 'Workers want to get a life', USA Today, September 3, 1993, p. 1.
The news from Japan is that heretofore stable employers are laying off people while other
firms are moving them laterally and downward in a last-gasp effort to fulfill their promise
of lifetime employment. Meanwhile, managers attend courses on how to be 'family men' and
a newly-formed institute on leisure educates the nation about the benefits of relaxation and
recreation. Now this concern with the perils of 'all work and no play' could have something
to do with desires to enhance creativity in Japanese companies. And training for family men
may be related to the nation's budding women's movement. Or both may be long linked to
layoffs and the prospects of slower population and economic growth in the future. We could
speculate endlessly about what is behind all of this, but limit ourselves to the observation
that corporate careerism in Japan seems to be going through a redefinition.
Definitions of work, nonwork, and careers are surely changing in America and in parts
of Europe. A decade-and-a-half of corporate downsizing and broad-based de-industrialization
CCC 0894-3796/94/040365-16
? 1994 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A proteanview of careers
To better conceptualize these psychic challenges and identify ways that people might address
them, it is necessary to decouple the concept of a career from its mooring in any one organization
and, indeed, from its exclusive association with paid employment. One recommendation is
to see careers as 'protean' (Hall, 1976). The term is taken from the name of the Greek god
Proteus who could change shape at will, from fire to a wild boar to a tree, and so forth.
This career concept can be defined as follows:
The protean career is a process which the person, not the organization, is managing. It
consists of all the person's varied experiences in education, training, work in several organi-
zations, changes in occupational field, etc. The protean career is not what happens to
the person in any one organization ... (Hall, 1976, p. 201).
There are several advantages that accrue from this career concept. First, it opens up new
ways to think about work over time. Most employers tend to think about career development
in terms of individuals developing from the early-to-mid stages of their employment and then
either 'plateauing' or 'dropping off' in terms of what they have to offer the organization (Barth,
McNaught and Rizzi, 1993). The protean concept, however, also encompasses careers marked
by peaks and valleys, by early or late blooming, and by movement from one line of work
to another (Hall, 1993).
Second, it enlarges what we might call the career space. There is a tendency to associate
a career with paid work and draw sharp distinctions between people's work and nonwork
lives. A more elastic concept, however, acknowledges that work and nonwork roles overlap
and shape jointly a person's identity and sense of self. In practical terms, an enlarged definition
of career space enables people to consider seriously taking time off to spend with growing
children or to care for aging parents under the rubric of attaining psychological success. Already
there are examples of people 'downshifting' in their careers to pursue hobbies or regain peace
of mind (Hyatt, 1990), doing volunteer work to give back to the community, and, of course,
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companies can also be costly: early retired executives earn on average less than 85 per cent
of their former salary when they move to another company and skilled manufacturing workers
earn an even lesser percentage when they move to the service sector (Willis, 1987; Fisher, 1988).
Furthermore, taking into account the costs of retraining and redeployment, plus the value
of lost earnings, the boundaryless career may well prove less remunerative than the stable
career paths of the past.
As to the psychic fallout, researchershave documented amply the emotional toll of unexpected
job loss (Brockner, Davy and Carter, 1985) and the tension associated with 'hanging on' versus
'letting go' even in the case of a planned change in jobs or employers (Bridges, 1980). Sarason
(1977) notes, as well, that many working people are imbued with the 'one life/one career' perspec-
tive that makes the idea of a career change especially threatening. Furthermore, there are bound
to be problems of adjustment as people unlearn familiar work habits and skills and have to
master new ones.
The foregoing suggests that one important way to experience psychological success over
the ups-and-downs of career cycles is to cultivate adaptability. Hall (1986) refers to this as
a 'meta-skill' as it enables people to accommodate to new tasks and relationships and to incorpor-
ate new roles and responsibilities into their personal identities. What is important to recognize,
moreover, is that personal adaptability is much sought after by boundaryless organizations:
it is what they look for when they hire from the outside and what they try to develop in
their 'high potential' employees. One survey of U.S. firms with 100 or more employees found
that 56 per cent offered personal growth training to their employees (Gordon, 1988). It is
not hard to imagine leading firms offering seminars on boundaryless career management as
part of their training portfolio in the future. Indeed, companies may pay a 'learning bonus'
to employees that begin a new and organizationally-valued career cycle and a premium for
the new skills that are mastered. The larger point is that people who can adapt to the challenges
of aging over several career cycles will have increased security within their organizations and
An integratedidentity
A recent survey finds that three-in-five American workers rate the effect of a job on their
personal and family life as 'very important' in making employment decisions far more so
than wages, benefits, and even job security (Galinsky and Friedman, 1993). With 87 per cent
of the American workforce living with at least one family member, finding time for spouse,
children, parents, or partners is a major priority for more and more people. The survey reports
that nearly half of the workforce rate the family supportive policies of employers as a key
consideration in their job choice.
Demographic shifts in the workforce, coupled with the increased priority many people place
on their family and personal life, make it imperative that companies respond to work/family
issues. Hall and Parker (1993) make the case that just as companies are becoming more flexible
in structure, staffing, and work systems, so also they need to be more flexible in the way they
view work roles. Indications are that more and more firms are offering flextime, work-at-
home options, part-time employment, and even job sharing and career breaks under the rubric
of work/family programming (Parker and Hall, 1993). Furthermore, the 'temporariness' of work
assignments in the future, coupled with advances in telecommunication technology, will afford
many more people the opportunity to work part-time, or from their homes, or on a seasonal
basis.
All of this flexibility, however, may well complicate and change people's work identities.
To this point, many people encapsulate their work, job, and employer in their work identities.
As all three will change more often in a boundaryless career, questions of 'what do I do?'
may be raised more frequently and insistently. Those who are part of dual career couples,
have children, or care for elders will have to contend not only with changing expectations
of their roles, but also with more options about how they might fill them. The key point here
is that as new career options open up boundariesaround work so also will they open up boundaries
of identity.
Of course, people's work identity is but one aspect of their larger sense of self or, expressed
another way, identity is made up of a collection of subidentities (Hall and Schneider, 1973).
The syndrome of 'career success/personal failure' identified by Korman and Korman (1980)
illustrates how some organization men compartmentalize their lives and fulfil their work-self
Employer-employeerelations
Rousseau (1990), drawing from legal scholars, has identified two types of employment contracts:
transactionaland relational. A transactional contract is defined in terms of a monetary exchange
over a specified period of time with the employer 'contracting' for the application of specific
skills to specific tasks and thence compensating the skillholder for satisfactory performance.
A relational contract, by comparison, is not time bound; rather it establishes an ongoing relation-
ship between the person and the organization, and involves the exchange of both monetary
and nonmonetary benefits, such as mutual loyalty, support, and career rewards. From this
vantage, one way to view the contemporary psychological contract between employers and
employees is to say that it is shiftingfrom a relational to transactionalcontract.
Who is likely to offer and get what type of contract in the years ahead? Setting this into
a framework of strategic human resource management, Rousseau argues that 'make'-oriented
firms, in Miles and Snow's (1984) terms, are more likely to establish relational contracts with
people, while 'buy'-oriented organizations are more likely to offer them transactional contracts.
Using Handy's (1989) framework, we can also hypothesize that those employees in the core
of a business are more apt to have a relational contract while those on the second and third
leaves will more likely have a transactional employment arrangement.
It is also possible that transactional contracts will become the norm in industry, particularly
in the U.S. For instance, many of the traditionally career-oriented employers - IBM, Hewlett
Packard, and AT&T among others - are increasingly hiring in managerial and professional
talent and making continued employment explicitly contingent on the fit between people's compe-
tencies and business needs. This ethic reaches its logical conclusion in Jack Welch, CEO of
General Electric, who contends that GE offers its people a 'one day contract' (Tichy and Sherman,
1993).
Our own view is that boundaryless organizations will use both relational and transactional
contracts - and in potentially very innovative ways. For instance, some employees might be
treated like 'partners', with a share in ownership, participation in profit sharing, and even
Research implications
All of this raises some important questions for further research. For instance, which type of
psychological contract is more apt to engender a sense of failure when people perform poorly?
In the case of a relational contract, one may see oneself as having let down peers and the
organization, incurring shame and a loss of self worth. This syndrome is common in Japanese
organizations, where it is reinforced by national culture, in elite branches of the U.S. armed
services, and, we suspect, wherever people intensely identify with their firms. At the same time,
companies that offer relational contracts to employees often have support systems to help them
cope with job failures and provide coaching and training to ensure that they learn from their
mistakes.
Under the terms of the transactional contract, one is hired for one's skills and expected
to perform successfully. To the extent that transaction employees may get more cues that success
is attributable to their distinct effort and skill, so also may they get more messages that failure
is due to their deficiencies. Furthermore, these workers do not typically have access to a long-
standing peer group or support system, nor are they often given a 'second chance' to redeem
themselves. On the contrary, when their transactional contract is not renewed, the explicit
and public signal is that they no longer add value to the company.
Other questions center on how employment contracts might affect the way people assume
a work role. For instance, even when achieving success in their transactional employment,
some will adopt a 'spot market' mentality and limit their investment to co-workers and the
company. Those seeking fuller engagement may find, to their disappointment, that they are
only 'partially' included in the core work and culture of the company. On the other hand,
continuous movement across work boundaries gives people more contacts and networks and
a fuller and deeper picture of what is going on in the firm. This could make transactional
employees especially valuable and yield them something akin to a retainerand relational contract.
Whether or not the type of employment contract affects people's influence in a company and
a sense of belonging depends both on how employees play their multiple roles and how they
are seen: are they repositories and disseminators of knowledge (Nonaka, 1988) or just transitory
figures who come and go?
It is also worth studying further the impact of choice in these different employment contracts.
In years past, movement toward relational contracts was influenced by collective bargaining
and common practice among leading companies. Today, by comparison, employers are seen
as more or less unilaterally dictating the terms. This has heightened fears of job insecurity
(Mirvis, 1992) and bred mistrust of companies by employees (Mirvis and Kanter, 1992). It
is also seen as a factor in crimes of revenge against management by displaced employees and
in the turnabout-is-fair-play job-hopping among those with the wherewithal to move nimbly
from company to company.
Psychologicalsuccessandlife's work
At this point, however, movement toward the boundaryless organization is well ahead of accep-
tance of the boundaryless career. Many people have resisted letting go of the seeming ideal
of lifetime work with one employer as well as the stability offered by predictable career paths.
As a consequence, when moved laterally, laid off, or forced to retire early, they experience
their loss of status or employment in relational terms: they were 'seduced' by their companies
and then 'betrayed', 'jilted' and 'abandoned' (Lewicki, 1981; Mirvis and Marks, 1992).
One prominent way that working people have coped with their disillusionment is by sliding
into cynicism (Kanter and Mirvis, 1989). In so doing, they lower their expectations of and
commitments to an employer, keeping their emotions in check and lowering their temperatures
to a bearable degree. To this extent, cynicism is a functional reaction as it shields people from
disappointment. At the same time, it plays havoc with the heart and hampers relationships
with a spouse, family, and friends (Williams, 1989). As more and more people embark on
boundaryless careers, however, better coping strategies will recommend themselves. One possi-
bility is that people will identify themselvesmore so with their workand less so with any particular
organization. Many self-employed consultants already pursue these kinds of careers and their
attachments to organizations may be a harbinger of things to come: as some describe it, rather
indelicately, its just 'sex' not 'marriage'.
At the same time, we expect leading companies to attempt to warm up and solidify this
transactional arrangementby explicitly offering more stimulation and developmental experiences
to people in exchange for their professional services. This will see employers making every
effort to attract and retain people under the guidelines that employees change jobs frequently,
move laterally willingly, and take increased responsibility for developing themselves and their
careers. Life in the boundaryless organization could prove nourishing: no doubt task challenges
and new relationships, when successfully managed and formed, will add significantly to people's
sense of achievement and enrich their social networks. It is also likely that these organizations
will provide chances for people to teach in public schools, work on community projects, partici-
pate in foreign joint ventures, get involved in environmental projects, and so on, all of which
might expand people's self-pictures and introduce them to new aspects of who they might
become. The irony is that boundaryless organizations could offer to those employees able to
negotiate its waterways the opportunity to have a one-company career, gain positions of promi-
nence and influence, and serve socializing and mentoring roles.
It will be useful to study under what conditions people grow from this kind of diverse,
potentially identity-stretching experience and when it overwhelms them and causes a psychic
shutdown. Likely as not, there will be points of optimal stretch where people can assimilate
the rich variety of stimuli into their self-picture and beyond which they become saturated and
lose theirself-identity (cf Gergen, 1991). In addition, it is worth examining under what conditions
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