Criteria of Career Success Article

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Heslin / CAREER SUCCESS CRITERIA 263

Most people want to feel successful at their work (Erikson, 1980; Greenhaus,1971; Super, 1990). Thus, for almost a century, career scholars have been con-cerned with the antecedents of career success (e.g., Boudreau, Boswell, & Judge,2001; Hughes, 1958; Parsons, 1909). From the resulting literature, it seemsapparent that an impressive body of knowledge has been accumulated about thesources of a successful career. This presumes, however, that the criterion,career success, has been adequately conceptualized and measured.

This article begins by critically evaluating this assumption. In particular, it isshown that the prevailing conceptualization and measurement of career successimplies that people only evaluate their career outcomes relative to self-referentcriteria. This assumption is questioned and tested, owing to theory and researchin social psychology (e.g., Adams, 1965; Festinger, 1954; Wood, 1989) that high-lights how individuals often evaluate the outcomes from their work in terms ofthe outcomes attained by other people. Heslin (2002) proposed that career schol-ars should consider incorporating other-referent career success into their theory

and research, although the empirical basis of this proposal is yet to be estab-lished.The present study investigated whether people do in fact evaluate their career

success relative to the career attainments and expectations of other people.Evidence that they do could have substantial implications for (a) enhancing theconstruct validity with which career success is conceptualized and measured, (b)providing insights for facilitating the experience of career success, and (c) ques-tioning the predictive validity of the extant literature regarding the antecedents ofcareer success, as considered in the following section.

SOURCES OF CAREER SUCCESS

A review of published empirical research on this topic over the past decaderevealed that five of the most commonly identified precursors of career successare gender, personality, education, mentoring relationships, and career tactics.The first two are ascribed characteristics, the latter three are enacted. Forinstance, gender has been found to be related to salary and managerial level(Melamed, 1995), as well as salary increases, management promotions, and hier-archical levels (Cox & Harquail, 1991). The personality dimensions of conscien-tiousness and extraversion have both been generally associated with higher sub-sequent job satisfaction, income, and occupational status (Judge et al., 1999;Seibert & Kraimer, 2001), whereas emotional instability has been related to

lower income, occupational status (Judge et al., 1999; Seibert & Kraimer, 2001),as well as job and career satisfaction (Boudreau et al., 2001; Seibert & Kraimer,2001). Regarding education, a persons educational level, quality, prestige, andtype of degree have all been found to predict subsequent financial success (Judge,Cable, Boudreau, & Bretz, 1995). Mentoring has been related to subsequentfinancial success (Kirchmeyer, 1998; Peluchette & Jeanquart, 2000), advance-


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Berman, & Lang, 1981; Schein, 1978). In fact, they can cause depressive reac-tions (Bandura, 1997), as well as work and personal alienation (Burke, 1999).Although such findings highlight the deficiency of objective career success crite-ria, this general point is not new. For example, 40 years ago, Hilton and Dill(1962) observed that the shortcomings of salary as a measure of mans [sic]progress are well known (p. 163). Thus, it is puzzling that salary continues to beso widely and often uncritically applied as a criterion of career success. On theother hand, a positive trend that addresses the deficiency of objective criteria hasbeen the increasing measurement of subjective success.

Subjective Criteria

Subjective career success is defined by an individuals reactions to his or hercareer (Hughes, 1958). Gattiker and Larwood (1988) suggested that subjectivecareer success criteria reflect an individuals values and preferences for thingssuch as a certain level of pay, challenge, or security that may serve as salient cri-teria for assessing their career accomplishments. Unlike objective success crite-ria, subjective measures may detect important career outcomes that are not read-ily assessable from personnel records (Gattiker & Larwood, 1988; Hall, 2002).Subjective career success is most commonly operationalized as job satisfaction(Judge et al., 1999; Markiewicz et al., 2000) or career satisfaction (e.g.,Greenhaus, Parasuraman, & Wormley, 1990; Seibert & Kraimer, 2001).

Job satisfaction is defined as the affect resulting from evaluating ones job sit-uation (Dawis & Lofquist, 1984). One limitation of using job satisfaction as anindicant of career success is that a person could be highly satisfied with his or hercurrent job, although dissatisfied with the career attainments that preceded it.

Also, a person who thinks that he or she has a highly successful career does notnecessarily consider it less successful if a job is started that is found dissatisfying.Finally, a person may hate what he or she is doing but be happy with the state ofthe career because of the prospects it brings. For instance, Wilensky (1960)described how graduate students defer gratification by working long hours for lit-tle direct compensation in the hope of being well-rewarded following graduation.Thus, career success includes actual and anticipated career-related attainmentsacross (a) a broader time frame than job satisfaction, as well as (b) a wider rangeof outcomes, such as a sense of purpose (Cochran, 1990; Hall, 2002) and work-life balance (Finegold & Mohrman, 2001). Although high job satisfaction maycontribute to the impression that one has a successful career, it is evident thatsubjective career success is not reducible to job satisfaction.

Career satisfaction is most often assessed using the widely adopted (e.g.,Boudreau et al., 2001; Judge et al., 1995; Seibert & Kraimer, 2001) career satis-faction scale developed by Greenhaus et al. (1990). Although such standardizedmeasures of subjective career success generally have acceptable levels of internalconsistency, such characteristics are not necessarily sufficient to validly assesseach respondents career success. For example, standardized scales with items


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266 JOURNAL OF CAREER ASSESSMENT / August 2003

measuring satisfaction with hierarchical success (e.g., Peluchette & Jeanquart,2000) or advancement (e.g., Greenhaus et al., 1990) are likely to be of limitedrelevance to the increasing number of people who work on a contract basis(Inkson, Heising, & Rousseau, 2001), run their own small business (Tullar,2001), value other features of their career much more highly (Aronsson, Bejerot,& Haerenstam, 1999), or are contentedly plateaued (Slocum, Cron, Hansen, &Rawlings, 1985). Assessing superfluous constructs is problematic not onlybecause of the potential to annoy respondents by asking irrelevant questions butalso owing to the inflation of the error within the resulting measurements ofcareer success. Thus, more needs to be understood about how to balance theimperativeson one hand, to attain efficient and comparable measurements,and on the other hand, to assess only what really matters to each person.

Another limitation of most extant subjective career success measures has beenthe implicit assumption that people only evaluate their career success relative totheir personal standards and aspirations. For instance, the Greenhaus et al.

(1990) career satisfaction scale assesses satisfaction with the progress made inmeeting my goals for income, my goals for advancement, and my goals forthe development of new skills. Similarly, Peluchette and Jeanquart (2000)assessed subjective career success using 11 items such as I am earning as muchas I think I am worth. These measures are potentially deficient by virtue ofneglecting the tendency of people to make social comparisons when evaluatingtheir career outcomes.

SOCIAL COMPARISON THEORY

Festingers (1954) social comparison theory states that (a) individuals are moti-vated to evaluate the outcomes they achieve and that (b) they attempt to do so bycomparing their actions and outcomes to those of other people. Several hundredstudies in social psychology have validated and extended these basic premises ofthe theory (Suls & Wheeler, 2000). For instance, Wheeler et al. (1969) validatedFestingers (1954) corollary hypothesis that people compare themselves to otherswho are similar but perform slightly less effectively, due to the desire for an imageof oneself as having high ability and performing effectively. Jellison and Arkin(1977) concluded that individuals seek out information concerning the attitudesand abilities of others with whom they will be competing or cooperating to gainrewards and avoid punishment. Within organizational settings, Mumford (1983)argued that reinforcement contingencies, such as promotions or raises, provide a

powerful incentive for individuals to regularly engage in social comparisons withtheir peers.Adams (1965) used social comparison theory as the basis for developing equi-

ty theoryone of the most widely applied theories of work motivation (Robbins,2000). According to equity theory, people compare themselves to others in termsof their inputs and outcomes. Inputs refer to contributions such as time, qualifi-


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matched by equivalent attention to the adequacy of how career success has beenconceptualized and assessed. It is axiomatic that the construct validity with whichcareer success is measured will constrain the criterion-related validity of research(Pursell, Dossett, & Latham, 1980) regarding the sources of career success. Thedevelopment of knowledge about the antecedents of career success has profitedfrom the trend toward overcoming the deficiencies with objective measures bysupplementing them with measures of subjective career success. By the samelogic, consideration of the extent to which subjective evaluations of career suc-cess reflect social comparison processes may lead to further improvements in theconceptualization and measurement of career success.

PREVALENCE AND UNIQUENESSOF OTHER-REFERENT CRITERIA

Career scholars have generally paid little attention to the extent to which indi-viduals evaluate their careers relative to other people. A possible explanation forthis trend is that much of the rhetoric of social policy and organizational leader-ship is designed to occlude and obfuscate the uncomfortable reality of substan-tial differences in pay, status, and other outcomes, so as to maintain the motiva-tion of people whose objective success is limited (Anthony, 1977; Nicholson,2002).

Regardless of the reason for it, the relative neglect of other-referent compar-isons in the career success literature is problematic as the referent chosen forassessing ones attainments has a substantial influence on how successful peopleconclude that they have been (Adams, 1965; Bandura, 1986; Heath, Larrick, &Wen, 1999; Wood, 1989). The extent of reliance on other-referent criteria maythus limit the (a) construct validity of previous operationalizations of career suc-cess, (b) criterion-related validity of the extant literature regarding theantecedents of career success, and (c) the utility of counseling interventionspredicated on an implicitly self-referent conceptualization of career success.

Based on this reasoning, Heslin (2002) advocated that future empirical stud-ies should measure career success relative to both self-referent and other-referent

criteria. Critical assumptions made by Heslin that are yet to be empirically test-ed are that (a) people evaluate their careers relative to personal aspirations andthe perceived attainments and expectations of other people and (b) surveyingself-perceptions of career success relative to others will enhance the constructvalidity with which career success is assessed, by virtue of tapping previously

unmeasured variance. The present research provided an initial empirical exam-ination of these issues.

Hypothesis 1: People evaluate their career success relative to self-referentand other-referent criteria.


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Even in the context of intimate relationships, Kamins, Morris, and Dweck(1996) found that among a college student sample, the incremental theoristssought someone who challenges me to grow, whereas the entity theorists weremore interested in finding someone who makes me look good in the eyes ofothers. Although not focused on career success, this research provides reason tosuggest that holding an entity IPT may be empirically related to people adopt-ing and emphasizing other-referent criteria when evaluating their career success.

Hypothesis 3: The extent to which people hold an entity IPT is positivelyrelated to (a) their adoption of other-referent criteria for evaluatingtheir career success, and (b) the weighting given to the attainments ofothers, relative to personal standards, when evaluating their careersuccess.

With the exception of studies using the scales developed by Lawrence (1984),as well as Turban and Dougherty (1994), all identified empirical research hasmeasured subjective career success relative to self-referent criteria (e.g., job andcareer satisfaction). To the extent that people also use other-referent criteria todetermine their overall career success, as predicted by Hypothesis 1, psychomet-ric measures of career success relative to self-referent criteria are likely to be defi-cient. If IPT is related to the selection and relative weighting of self-referent andother-referent criteria, as predicted by Hypotheses 3a and 3b, IPT is likely to playa role in the extent to which self-referent measures of career success account foroverall career success.

Hypothesis 4: The relationship between self-referent and overall career suc-cess is moderated by IPT, such that the correlation between self-referentand overall career success is lower for those holding an entity IPT.

METHOD

Participants

Part-time MBA students (N = 71) at a leading Canadian business school par-ticipated in this study. There were 32 women and 39 men. The average age ofthe participants was 34.7 years and they had an average of 10.2 years work expe-rience. Neither age nor work experience were empirically related to any of thestudy variables.

Measures

Overall career success. Ironson, Smith, Brannick, Gibson, and Paul (1989)argued that job satisfaction is so broad that a single item captures its essence moreeffectively than facet scores. As Wanous, Reichers, and Hudy (1997) provided


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meta-analytic support for the construct validity of single-item job satisfactionscales, self-perceptions of overall career success were measured with the itemEverything considered, how successful do you consider your career to date?Ratings were made on a Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (not too successful) to 7(very successful).

Implicit person theory. The 8-item scale developed by Levy and Dweck (1997)and adopted by Levy et al. (1998) was used to assess each participants IPT. Thisscale has four items measuring entity beliefs and four measuring incrementalbeliefs. A sample entity belief item is As much as I hate to admit it, you cantteach an old dog new tricks. People cant change their deepest attributes. A sam-ple incremental belief item is People can substantially change the kind of per-son they are. Participants rated every item on a 6-point Likert scale ranging from1 (strongly agree) to 6 (strongly disagree). Reverse scoring the incremental itemsto produce a single scale is justified because of the substantial evidence regard-ing the unidimensional nature of incremental and entity beliefs (Levy & Dweck,1997). This scale has test-retest reliability of .82 over a 1-week period and .71 overa 4-week period (Levy & Dweck, 1997), high internal consistency ( = .93; Levyet al., 1998), and construct validity, as indicated by (a) significant relationshipswith the intended consequences of implicit beliefs such as goals, attributions,and affect (Dweck, 1999); and (b) being unrelated to self-presentation, optimism,need for structure, and IQ (Levy et al., 1998), or intellectual ability (Dweck,1999). In the present study, this scale had good internal consistency ( = .94).

Criteria for evaluating career success. To test Hypothesis 1, the following open-ended question was asked: Please evaluate your career success at this point intime. Try to be specific about how you know the extent to which your career is

successful. This question was the result of pilot testing conducted to ensure thatparticipants were likely to provide an adequately detailed answer to it (Alreck &Settle, 1985). Pilot study results were used to develop a coding guide that includ-ed guidelines for classifying criteria as either self-referent or other-referent.Sample self-referent criteria in the guide include achieved my goals, feels likeIve arrived, good money, and well paid. Note that although the latter twocriteria could be either self-referent or other referent, the guide required that theybe categorized as self-referent unless they were clearly other referent (e.g., wellpaid compared to my colleagues). This was to ensure that any support obtainedfor the hypothesis about people generating other-referent criteria would not bean artifact of the criteria-coding procedure.

Sample other-referent items from the coding guide include faster progression

than peers, acknowledgement/feedback by peers or supervisor, earn a wayabove average income, and given respect and recognition. These criteria rep-resent people evaluating their career relative to the attainments or evaluations ofother people. Participants self-referent and other-referent criteria generated werecoded and then counted by two independent raters. The coding guide stipulatedthat criteria that were repeated, even if synonyms (e.g., money and financial),


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were to be counted only once. The interrater agreement (.92) between the twoindependent codings was acceptable.

Success relative to self-referent and other-referent criteria. Hypotheses 2, 3a, and

4 were assessed with a slightly modified version of the widely used career satis-faction scale developed by Greenhaus et al. (1990), which Seibert and Kraimer(2001) reported had acceptable internal consistency ( = .83). Participants wereasked to evaluate how satisfied they are with (a) the overall success I haveachieved in my career, (b) the income I have attained, (c) the advancementI have attained, (d) the skill development I have attained, (e) the autonomyI have attained, and (f) the intellectual stimulation I have attained. Consistentwith Greenhaus et al. (1990), self-referent success was measured by asking thesequestions relative to my career aspirations. In addition, other-referent successwas measured by asking these questions again relative to my career peers.Ratings were made on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7(strongly agree). Responses to the six items regarding success relative to mycareer aspirations were averaged to produce a success relative to self-referent cri-teria score, which had acceptable internal inconsistency (a = .88). This proce-dure was repeated using the items regarding success relative to my career peersto produce a success relative to other-referent criteria score, which had highinternal inconsistency ( = .95).

Salience of other-referent criteria. To test Hypothesis 3b, participants wereasked to estimate how successful their career would be if each of six hypotheticalscenarios were true. Ratings were made on a Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (nottoo successful) to 7 (very successful). Three of the scenarios combined a relativesuccess in the self-referent domain with an other-referent relative failure, such as

My career would be successful if I had . . . improved my career prospects overthe last few years, even if I still perceived them to be below the average of mycareer peers. Responses indicating that this outcome would represent career suc-cess were deemed to be indicative of giving high salience to self-referent criteria,in this case, the personal improvement in prospects relative to what they hadbeen a few years ago.

The other three scenarios combined an other-referent relative success with aself-referent relative failure, such as more intellectual stimulation than most ofmy colleagues, though less than I wanted. Responses indicating that this out-come would represent career success were deemed to reflect other-referent cri-teria having high salience as the success was higher relative to the respondentscolleagues than her or his personal aspirations. Scores on the three self-referent

items were reverse scored. The mean of the six resulting items for each respon-dent was interpreted as reflecting the relative salience of other-referent criteriawhen evaluating their career success. This strategy of assessing preferences forpotential career-related outcomes is consistent with that adopted in the measuresdeveloped by Derr (1988), Schein (1990), and Stephens, Szajna, and Broome(1998). Moreover, the ipsative format, whereby the strength of preferences for


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being key elements of overall career success. Table 1 reveals that overall careersuccess was significantly related to career success relative to (a) self-referent cri-teria (r= .55, p < .01), (b) other-referent criteria (r= .65, p < .01), and (c) others(r= .76, p < .01).

These three significant relationships support the convergent validity of theoverall career success measure. A corollary of the psychometric maxim that reli-ability places a ceiling on validity is that a single-item scale must be at least as reli-able as it is valid. Thus, the evidence for the convergent validity of the overallcareer success measure suggests it is at least modestly reliable.

By contrast, there is no apparent reason why the relative use or salience ofeither (a) self-referent criteria or (b) other-referent criteria would be related tooverall career success. Table 1 shows that overall career success was not signifi-cantly related to the number of self-referent (r= .06, p > .05) or other-referent (r= .14, p > .05) criteria generated, the proportion of other-referent criteria (r=.09, p > .05), or the salience of other-referent criteria when making career deci-

sions (r= .01, p > .05). These four relationships are consistent with this meas-ure having discriminant validity. Taken together, the evidence in support of theconvergent and discriminant validity, as well as the reliability of the overall careersuccess scale, suggests it has acceptable psychometric properties to be used as thecriterion when assessing Hypotheses 2, 3a, and 4.

Self- versus other-referent criteria. Responses to the open-ended questionregarding participants criteria for evaluating their career success were coded bytwo independent raters using the procedure outlined above. To standardize, with-in participants, the number of self-referent and other-referent success criteriagenerated, the proportion of other-referent criteria was calculated by dividing thenumber of other-referent criteria by the total number of self-referent and other-

referent success criteria each participant generated.

Salience of other-referent criteria. Granted that this scale was intended tomeasure reliance on other-referent criteria, it could be expected to be positivelyrelated to the use of the attainments and expectations of other people when eval-uating career success. Contrary to this expectation, salience of other-referent cri-teria was negatively related (r= .32, p < .01) to the use of other-referent criteria(see Table 1). There are several reasons, however, why this unexpected negativerelationship could reflect error in the use of an other-referent criteria validitycheck measure, rather than the salience of an other-referent criteria scale. First,use of other-referent criteria is only a single-item measure in which participantscould freely respond on the 7-point scale. By contrast, the salience of an other-

referent criteria scale includes six items. Second, participants may have hadsocial desirability concerns about explicitly acknowledging that they make socialcomparisons when evaluating their career success, owing to the social sanctionsagainst doing so outlined above. If this occurred, relative to the use of an other-referent criteria measure, the ipsative nature of the salience of an other-referent


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Table 1Means, Standard Deviations, Reliabilities,and Correlations Among Study Variables

M SD 1 2 3 4 5 6

1. (Entity) Implicit Person Theory (IPT) 3.34 1.29 (0.94)

2. Self-referent criteria generated 4.40 3.00 0.29*

3. Other-referent criteria generated 3.69 2.25 0.31* 0.11

4. Proportion of other-referent criteria 0.38 0.31 0.37** 0.46** 0.69**

5. Success relative to self-referent criteria 5.09 1.14 0.16 0.04 0.17 0.03 (0.88)

6. Success relative to other-referent criteria 5.08 1.35 0.20 0.04 0.16 0.02 0.87** (0.95)

7. Salience of other-referent criteria 4.16 1.00 0.12 0.29* 0.01 0.01 0.14 0.187

8. Use of other-referent criteria 4.63 1.62 0.12 0.21* 0.04 0.27* 0.05 0.15

9. Success relative to others 5.10 1.34 0.26* 0.09 0.05 0.02 0.62** 0.69**

10. Overall career success 4.86 1.28 0.39** 0.06 0.14 0.09 0.55** 0.65**

Note. Coefficient alphas are reported along the diagonal in parentheses.

*p < .05. **p < .01.

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criteria scale should have decreased the likelihood of responses being distorted byan impression management bias (Jackson, Wroblewski, & Ashton, 2000).

Two factors mitigate against these reasons why the use of an other-referent cri-teria measure may have been inadequate. First, the use of an other-referent cri-teria validity check measure had the expected pattern of correlations with thenumber of self-referent criteria (r= .21, p


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Hypothesis 3a states that the extent to which people hold an entity IPT is pos-itively related to their adoption of other-referent criteria for evaluating their

career success. The significant correlation of .31 (p < .05) between entity IPTand the number of other-referent criteria participants generated is consistent withHypothesis 3a. If holding an entity IPT is related to people using more other-referent criteria, it could also be expected to be related to them using relativelyfewer self-referent criteria. This derivation of Hypothesis 3a was supported by thenegative correlation of .29 (p < .05) between entity IPT and the number of self-referent criteria used. Finally, the extent to which participants held an entity IPTwas positively related (.37; p < .01) to the proportion of other-referent criteriathey used to evaluate their career success (see Table 1). Thus, consistent withHypothesis 3a, when evaluating their career success, incremental theorists userelatively more self-referent criteria, whereas entity theorists use more other-referentcriteria.

Hypothesis 3b states that the extent to which people hold an entity IPT is pos-itively related to their giving greater weighting to the attainments of others, rela-tive to personal standards, when evaluating their career success. The correlationof .12 (p > .05) between entity IPT and the salience of other-referent criteriameasure was in the predicted direction, but was not significant. Thus, Hypothesis3b was not supported. This nonsignificant finding does not, however, disconfirmthe hypothesis that entity theorists give greater weighting to others attainmentsas it may be attributable to the poor psychometric properties of the salience ofother-referent criteria scale outlined above.

According to Hypothesis 4, the relationship between self-referent and overallcareer success is moderated by IPT, such that the correlation between self-referent

and overall-career success is lower for those holding an entity IPT. This potentialmoderator effect was examined using the hierarchical regression procedure advo-cated by Baron and Kenny (1986). During the first step of this procedure, it wasfound that self-referent success accounted for 30% of the variance in overallcareer success (p < .01). When self-referent success was held constant and IPTwas entered into the model, the R2 change (i.e., .09) was significant (p < .01).

Table 2Number of Participants Who Generated Self- and Other-Referent Criteria

NoSelf-Referent Self-Referent

Criteria Criteria Total Percentage

Other-referent criteria 44 4 48 68

No other-referent criteria 19 4 23 32

Total 63 8 71

Percentage 89 11


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Finally, when the interaction between self-referent success and entity IPT wasentered, the R2 change (i.e., .10) was again significant (p < .01).

Given that these results indicated a significant moderation of the relationshipbetween self-referent and overall career success, consistent with Hypothesis 4,the next step was to determine the nature of the relationship. Following the stan-dard procedure adopted in previous IPT studies (e.g., Chiu et al. 1997; Levy et al.,1998), participants whose mean IPT score on the 6-point scale was 4 or above(n = 30) were deemed to be entity theorists. Those whose mean IPT score was 3or below (n = 32) were deemed to be incremental theorists. Thus, it was foundthat the correlation between self-referent and overall career success was .38 (p

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