Career inaction

Most of us are likely to have phases of action and inaction throughout our various career stages, perhaps not necessarily taking action when we should. Career inaction is now a career theory of Verbruggen & De Vos (2020), where those of us with "turnover intentions [may] stay in their organization, and people with entrepreneurial desires often turn out to be wantrepreneurs" (p. 376; emphasis added). I found 'wantrepreneurs' a very evocative term, for those of us who are all talk and no trousers. We get stuck in 'inaction', where we fail "to act sufficiently on a desired change" (p. 376), which may eventually lead to "life regret" (p. 377).

However, career inaction might also be what helps to keep the world of work relatively stable; perhaps why new trends may be slower to take hold than predicted (Dries & Verbruggen, 2022; Verbruggen & De Vos, 2020) - such as the boundaryless career (read more on boundaryless careers here). 

But what keeps us in work which we have grown out of? Well, it appears that uncertainty avoidance - personal or cultural - seems to have a part to play (Dries & Verbruggen, 2022; read more here), which appears to relate to some identity concepts, specifically "the 'striving me,' the 'comfortable me,' and the 'uncertain me'" (Rogiers et al., 2022, p. 10):

• Comfortable me: where we are "comforted and stuck by the benefits (e.g., salary, seniority, pension schemes), familiarity, and mastery (e.g., knowing what to expect, knowing what to do)" in our work (Rogiers et al., 2022, p. 6)
• Striving me: This is where we might be short on "career progress and [feel] a need for continuous learning", with a "mismatch between [our] lived career experience and [our] developmental needs" (p. 6). We need to change something to scratch a self-developmental itch 
• Uncertain me: where we feel "uncertainty and fear, despite [our] desire for change" (p. 6). This seems similar to Hofstede's "Uncertainty avoidance, or the degree to which people in a country prefer structured over unstructured situations: from relatively flexible to extremely rigid" (1989, p. 392), where we "feel threatened by ambiguous or unknown situations and have created beliefs and institutions that try to avoid these" (Dries & Verbuggen, 2022, p. 65, citing Hofstede, 2001).

If we are largely comfortable me, there is little need for change. If we are largely striving me, we will probably build in our own change. But an uncertain me may see more risk than in fact there is. 

So how might we make a largely uncertain me see a way to safely change? Seeing a career coach seems a logical way to shift an uncertain me from inaction to action (Dries & Verbuggen, 2022), but also having corporate initiatives such organisational internships where staff can try out new roles for three or six months would help those who are feeling stuck to try before they buy. 

Sam

References:

Dries, N., & Verbruggen, M. (2023). Chapter 8: Career Inaction in Belgium: When you want to make a career change, but you just … don’t. In J. Briscoe, M. Dickmann, D. T. Hall, W. Mayrhofer, E. Parry (Eds.), Understanding Careers Around the Globe (pp. 64-72). Edward Elgar Publishing.

Hofstede, G. (1989). Organising for Cultural Diversity. European Management Journal, 7(4), 390-397. https://doi.org/10.1016/0263-2373(89)90075-3

Rogiers, P., Verbruggen, M., D'Huyvetter, P., & Abraham, E. (2022). Stuck between me: A psychodynamic view into career inaction. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 136, 103745, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2022.103745

Verbruggen, M., & De Vos, A. (2019). When People Don’t Realize Their Career Desires: Toward a Theory of Career Inaction. Academy of Management Review, 45(2), 376-394. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMR.2017.0196