Kaleidoscope Career Model

Mainiero and Sullivan in 2005 presented their career model: the Kaleidoscope
Model (KCM) as a response to the lack of models for understanding women’s
experiences. The KCM was based on a large five-year multi-method project that
included five studies: an online career transition survey of female network
members from a professional organization; internet survey of men and women;
weekly online interviews with 2 women and 22 men enrolled in the MBA program;
a second online survey with women and men answering questions about career
changes; and finally interview with a purposive sample of 52 people about their
careers. The KCM aimed to more accurately capture women’s career experiences.
In particular, he tried to explain how women work to prioritize relationships in
their lives. Mainiero and Sullivan proposed that individuals make decisions based
on three career parameters: authenticity, balance and challenge. KCM defined
these parameters as follows:
1. Authenticity: Can I be myself in the middle of it all and still be authentic?
2. Balance: If I make this career decision, can I balance the parts of my life
well so that a coherent whole emerge?
3. Challenge: Will I be challenged enough if I take this career choice?

Mainiero and Sullivan used a kaleidoscope metaphor for careers. Rotating the
kaleidoscope tube creates changing patterns as its glass shards fall into different
times in his life, an individual changes his career pattern and chooses to work
towards balance on one hand and challenge or authenticity on the other. People
work to best fit the demands and constraints of work, relationships and values. Just
as a kaleidoscope generates a characteristic pattern through constant adjustments,
so an individual creates a complex and individually crafted career pattern.
Mainiero and Sullivan suggested that their model has particular relevance to
women’s careers. Moreover, women used it unconsciously when coping with and
responding to discrimination and when juggling multiple caregiving needs. More
importantly, kaleidoscope career model provides a way to explore the questions:
“How women’s careers evolving” and “What are is the meaning of careers?
Empirical research to validate the KCM has revealed gender differences in career
enactment. Men tended to follow what the researchers called the Alpha
Kaleidoscope career pattern-challenge followed by authenticity and then balance.
In comparison, women are described as having a beta Kaleidoscope career pattern
of challenge, followed by balance and authenticity. The career patterns of women
in these KCM studies differed markedly from the traditional linear career model.
These women rejected a linear career path and created unconventional careers of
their own. Their careers were characterized by the need to seek challenges and
learning opportunities, but were limited by a lack of opportunities for advancement
and blatant gender discrimination. Women faced opportunities and blocks and
responded in unique ways. KCM studies found that in stark contrast to men,
women’s career histories were relational. Moreover, these women’s career
decision-making processes were more contextual. Their decisions fit into a larger
web of interrelated issues and relationships that came together in a finely
integrated package. KCM women made career decisions with a strong weight of
relational needs. They considered the impact of their decisions on others, taking
into account the needs of partners, children’s, parents, and colleagues. Their
careers were characterized by career interruptions that required attention to non-
work needs, but also the search for spiritual fulfillment, staying true to oneself, and
taking care of oneself. In one of the first empirical studies examining KCM,
Cabrera conducted a large survey of female business school graduates career
transitions. Most participants ranged in age from 26 to 55 and most graduates
received their graduate degree between 1980 and 1999. The aims of the study
were: to explore the reasons why women leave the workforce; examine whether
women’s main career motives change over time; and explore the potential barriers
faced by women pursuing borderless careers. Consistent with KCM, reasons for
leaving were complex with multiple push and pull factors creating non-linear
patterns characteristic of women career. Reasons such ass difficulties with a two-
career family, relocation of a partner and layoffs have emerged. For most women,
their professional focus has changed over time. The results showed that almost half
of these business graduates stopped working at some point in their careers, but the
majority returned to work. 35% of these women cited child care as the only reason
for leaving work. 62% said their professional focus had changed over time. The
most significant results of the study were consistent with the KCM predictions.
The shift toward balance was strongly exhibited by mid-career women and many
early-career women as well, providing preliminary evidence for KCM’s claim that
women begin with an emphasis on challenge and move toward balance. The
percentage of women who shifted toward an authenticity focus progressively
increased as their careers progressed, a movement consistent with KCM’s view
that late-career women seek work that allows them to be true to themselves.
Another study by Cabrera in 2009 used semi-structured telephone interviews with
35 US female school graduates between the age of 34 and 57. Participants left the
workforce at some point in their careers and subsequently returned to work. The
study sought to better understand women’s careers in order to work to increase the
retention of women in organizations. One research question was asked: What
guides women’s career decisions. Most of these women followed a protean career
orientation upon returning to work. Adopting a protean career orientation which
draws on the Greek god Proteas, who could change his shape at will meant that
women could tailor their career package knowledge, skills and abilities to maintain
marketability in a changing work environment. Cabrera stated that they were
forced to accept this to fulfill their need for balance. About a third of the sample
identified a need for authenticity in their careers; a small minority mentioned a
desire for challenge, suggesting that this need was met early in their careers, as
predicted by KCM. Most recently, Cohen discussed the kaleidoscope parameters of
authenticity, balance, and challenge with respect to some of the seventeen women
in her longitudinal study. All of these women were located in a large northern
industrial city in the United Kingdom and all decided to leave the organization in
which they were employed and become self-employed. Cohen interviewed the
participants in 1993 and returned to them seventeen years later in 2010. The
women were aged 32 to 54 at the start of the study. Although challenge was
evident as a dominant parameter in Cohen's participants' accounts of early careers,
they also began to acquire notions of authenticity. Participants demonstrated early-
career authenticity that grew and developed in the intervening period 17 years
between the two interviews. The participants' sense of authenticity “provided a
coherent thread across the two interviews”. Rather than being distinct from balance
and challenge, authenticity has been established to encompass both of these
aspects. Cohen noted that the results of her analysis contradicted those of Mainier
and Sullivan most notably at mid-career, where "a shift toward balance did not
emerge as a major feature in the data". Late in her career her findings were
synchronous with Mainier and Sullivan as authenticity became sharper. Cohen
argued that rather than “distinct and indisputable parameters” her study results
indicate that there are no extreme divisions, rather there is an interweaving and
merging of parameters at different points in women's lives. She further noted that
balance was often expressed as a challenge and that both of these parameters were
related to comments on meaning and significance. The debate over whether men
and women are allies or adversaries in dealing with the issue of work-family
balance has long been contentious. Sullivan and Mainiero looked at recent changes
in how dual-career couples pursue careers and reported that an increasing number
of men have begun to adopt the role of husband in the home. They called for more
research to determine the factors influencing this shift, as well as whether these
men might ever return to the workforce. They recommended research to determine
whether a wife's career is positively affected when her husband adopts the role of
"househusband" in a similar way that a man's career is affected when his wife
assumes the role of "housekeeper" Mainiero, Recently, Litano, Myers, and Major
provided a new perspective on the “allies versus adversaries” debate. They
suggested that the answer centers on the extent to which women's and men's
attempts to manage work-family conflict and balance are synchronous. This
"crossover" research addresses the question, "Does one partner's positive or
negative spillover affect the other partner's work-family balance?" Recent
crossover research has examined positive crossover effects at the work-family
boundary. Men and women have been shown to be allies in their mutual
determination to balance work and family .In these studies, positive well-being was
seen to transfer from one person to another in both realms “initiating an upward
spiral of positive transfer”. In their extensive review of current career research over
the past twenty years, Sullivan and Baruch noted the progress made in
understanding the complexities of emerging non-linear career concepts such as
KCM and stated that “newer conceptualizations suggest many interesting avenues
for future study”. The advantage of the Kaleidoscope career model is how it
emphasizes the importance of gender differences in career path enactment.
Sullivan and Baruch urged that more research is needed on new theories such as
KCM to focus on how individuals change their psychological perspectives over
time and to better understand the complex relationship between physical and
psychological passages.

Women’s career

While progress has been made in recent decades toward understanding women's
careers, historical roles and beliefs surrounding women as homemakers and
mothers continue to influence every aspect of women's career choices and limit
what women can achieve (Fitzgerald, Fassinger, & Betz, 1995; Mainiero &
Sullivan, 2006). There is still a prevailing view that women's careers are less
important than men's because women experience more paid work breaks.
Interruptions for women are more likely to be due to family demands, while career
interruptions for men are more likely to result from job loss (Betz, 2002;
Kirchmeyer, 2002; Mainiero & Sullivan, 2005). Despite the growth of career
research, much of the discussion about women has repeated errors and omissions
from the male-focused literature. There is still very little career research that puts
women's experiences at the center of career theory. For example, there is an
overemphasis on individual managers and professional women (Burke & Nelson,
2002; Career Development International, 2005; Sullivan & Baruch, 2009) and
numerous examples of research that includes gender as simply another variable -
an acknowledged career construct (e.g. Mayrhofer , Meyer, & Steyrer, 2007). In
the 1990s, a deficit approach to women's career research was evident. It continues
today within a liberal feminist agenda that implicitly (Sullivan & Mainiero, 2007a)
or explicitly uses men's paid work as a standard of inquiry. In traditional career
theory, women's careers have been conceptualized as intermittent and atypical.
They are characterized by movement and exit from the paid workforce; a series of
projects connected by the skills of individual women, gathering knowledge and
experience. This norm is no longer specific to women, but has become a model for
careers in general (Woodd, 2000). Career life came to be seen as a series of
projects rather than continuous service within a single organization or occupation.
The ways in which women coped with this style of career life have been largely
ignored by mainstream career theory, traditional or 'boundaryless'. Pringle and
Mallon (2003) discussed the extent to which boundaryless career theory carried
over the 'sins of traditional theory', excluding unpaid work and omitting many key
decision-making criteria relevant to women's experience. Career models for
women are compared to men's models and carry assumptions that the career goal is
increasing responsibility and status (Burke & Nelson, 2002) even in non-linear
models (White, 1995). Family responsibilities are still emphasized as the primary
explanation for women's career decisions, despite evidence to the contrary.
Unfortunately, "women" remain culturally homogenous, Western, white, and
heterosexual. Recent research is beginning to distinguish patterns between women
and men, but continues to consist of privileged samples of managers and corporate
professionals or over-sampled MBA students. Career analysis from a more radical
feminist tradition draws on the theory of differences, especially on theories of
women's psychological development. Within this research genre, the gender
difference argument has gained strength through relational theories of women's
development (Jordan, 1997). In Marshall's seminal allegorical work (1989), she
distinguished between feminine and masculine principles to emphasize the "other"
professional experiences of women. It developed and extended the early
importance of Bakan's (1966) concepts of agency and community as a sense
framework for understanding career behavior. Agency (or "doing") is expressed
through control over the environment and manifests in self-defense, self-
advancement, and self-expansion, and is symbolized as an arrow. In contrast,
community (or "being") manifests itself in the sense of unity with other organisms,
is part of a wider context emphasizing interdependence, openness and flexibility
with the environment. It is symbolized as a spiral (Marshall, 1989). Empirical
research (Arthur, Inkson, & Pringle, 1999; Cabrera, 2007; O'Neill & Bilimoria,
2005) confirms the pursuit of a balance between agency and community as central
to women's careers. This search for balance manifests differently in advanced
models: explore, focus, rebalance (Pringle & McCulloch Dixon, 2003), idealistic
achievement, pragmatic persistence and rediscovery contribution (O'Neill &
Bilimoria, 2005), and "beta" careers full of challenges, balance and authenticity
(Sullivan & Mainiero, 2007a). The risk in these accounts is that, in creating
alternative notions of career, they do so implicitly by essentializing gender
differences. Feminist critiques of career theory have been fragmentary and
sporadic (Gutek & Larwood, 1987) rather than forming an incremental explanatory
body of scholarship. However, there is no basis for continued reluctance to suggest
that “traditional male models of career development may not apply to women”
(Armstrong-Stassen & Cameron, emphasis added by current authors). It is time to
embrace the scholarship and arguments of the last 25 years; Women's careers are
characterized by interdependence, relationship and fluidity between myriad roles