What it Means to Succeed: Personal Conceptions of Career Success Held by Male and Female Managers at Different Ages

TLDR

The study explores how managers personally define career success, addressing a gap in career literature by focusing on individual perspectives rather than organizational metrics. Researchers categorized managers’ success criteria into four orientational categories—Climbers, Experts, Influencers, and Self‑Realizers—to analyze differences across gender and age. Women and older managers were less likely to equate success with hierarchical or financial advancement, suggesting implications for individuals and organizations.

Abstract

This paper describes the findings of a qualitative study which analyses how managers define career success for themselves on their own terms. In exploring career success from the perspective of the individual, not the organization, the research attempts to fill an identifiable gap in the career literature. The paper examines the criteria which individuals use to describe what career success means to them, and expresses them by means of a series of orientational categories – Climbers, Experts, Influencers and Self‐Realizers – which classify the different ways in which managers talk about career success. The variations in the way that the male and female, and older and younger, research participants describe what career success means to them are discussed and compared. The women managers and older managers who took part in the study appear less inclined to define career success in terms of hierarchical and financial progression: the paper considers the implications of this for individuals and for organizations.