Organizational and Post-Organizational Career Aspirations, Personality Traits and Behavior

We examine the relationship between career aspirations of business school graduates defined as their intention to be active in particular career fields and five personality and behavioral traits: (1) adaptability, (2) sociability, (3) power and politics motive pattern, (4) need for achievement and (5) accuracy. Results demonstrate a one factor solution differentiating between an Organizational-Career-Aspiration and a Post-Organizational-Career-Aspiration. Our results suggest that the more actors show a tendency towards post-organizational career pattern the more they display attributes of high flexibility, self-monitoring, leadership-motivation, openness for social contacts and less conscientiousness. For individuals preferring an organizational career pattern, inverse relationships apply.INTRODUCTION Today's professional careers are more diverse than ever, empirically we know little about them and we do not have adequate theoretical concepts to describe and explain them. Career research has been dealing with careers in general and with professional careers in specific for a long time. Researchers from a great number of disciplines, from various perspectives and focusing on different levels of analysis have contributed to the understanding of what happens when individuals travel through their professional lives on various routes (see, e. As long as organizations can be regarded as one of the core characteristics of industrial societies, this was quite adequate. But things have changed. Since the 1980's the situation has become more complex. Change drivers like globalization, virtualization, demographic developments or value changes have led to new forms of organizations, new forms of organizing and new forms of private and professional life Ohmae, 2001). These developments did not leave careers untouched. Several influential writers have proclaimed and analyzed a period of transition leading to new forms of careers analyses and expectations, they have at least two things in common. First, the significance of organizations as the central arena for professional careers will decrease. Partly replacing the 'traditional' organizational career, new forms of careers 'outside' of organizations will develop. Whether deliberately or because of a lack of choice, people's careers will increasingly take place either entirely or to a great extent outside of organizations. Labels like 'newly self-employed', 'one-person-employer', 'dependent independents' or 'own account self-employed' have been coined to describe these phenomena (Mayrhofer & Meyer, 2001). Second, professional careers have become more diverse and this will be increasingly the case in the future. The 'traditional' model of 'one career' starting with a specific kind of training in one's early career stages leading to a quite stable career path in …