A review of four decades of research in organisational career psychology by academia in South Africa

How to cite this article: Schreuder, D., & Coetzee, M. (2012). A review of four decades of research in organisational career psychology by academia in South Africa. SA Journal of Human Resource Management/SA Tydskrif vir Menslikehulpbronbestuur, 10(2), Art. #474, 10 pages. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/ sajhrm.v10i2.474 Orientation: Career research in organisations has increased in importance since the 1970s, which heralded new directions for organisational career research and practice both globally and nationally.


Introduction Key focus of the study
Career research '... will have to match the nature of its subject: rapidly changing, fast learning and complex' (Hall & Mirvis, 1995, p. 349).
Career research in organisations has increased in importance since the 1970s, a period which heralded new directions for career research both globally and nationally.Representing the renewal of the careers field, the 1970s witnessed a reinvention and regeneration of innovative theory production, collegial dialogue and the establishment of the careers field in professional societies (Derr & Briscoe, 2007).This was achieved under the mentoring influence of Edgar Schein of the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).Today it is recognised that the increasingly complex and turbulent contexts in which people have been pursuing their careers, since the catalytic 1970s, continue to demand the generation and development of knowledge for the benefit of the discipline and practice of careers (Creager, 2011;Krieshok, Motl & Rutt, 2011;Obschonka, Silbereisen & Wasilewski, 2012;Savickas, 2011).Derr and Briscoe (2007) also regard career research as a central element of contemporary organisational studies.

Background to the study
Career psychology was legitimised as a field within the more generalised field of organisation studies during the mid-1970s.During the mid-1980s and early 1990s, the emergence of the socalled knowledge economy resulted in scholars drastically rethinking the very nature of work and careers (Gunz & Peiperl, 2007).Globalisation, technological advances, changes in industrial and employment structures for production flexibility, political change and the diversification of workforce demographics (within a context of heightened economic uncertainty and turbulence) witnessed the emergence of the boundary-less and so-called 'non-traditional' career in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Gunz & Peiperl, 2007;Obschonka et al., 2012;Savickas, 2011).
Since the early 2000s, there has been a continuance of these trends along with rising unemployment and concerns about skills scarcity, which increasingly affect the jobs, careers and lives of people in the 21st century (Schreuder & Coetzee, 2011).Savickas (2011) emphasises the need for the information societies of the 21st century to learn how to deal with uncertainty, numerous employment transitions and jobless or temporary work assignments.Savickas posits that career studies, whilst adopting a constructionist research paradigm, should focus attention on peoples' employability rather than on their employment (2011).Innovative career counselling and development theories and practices are required, that help individuals develop the required career adaptability skills to reconceptualise their careers in the 21st century and redesign their working lives.Obschonka et al. (2012) further point to a lack of research on individuals' subjective experiences (intraindividual constellations) of change-related demands.Schein (2007) emphasises that career research in the 21st century world of work should continue to address contemporary problems faced by individuals and organisations.Apart from contributing new, relevant knowledge and innovative solutions to the career challenges of the contemporary world of work (Savickas, 2011), career scholars (and their research) need to help management scholars and practitioners recognise the primacy of career theory and scholarship to the key questions facing organisations and individuals today (Derr & Briscoe, 2007).

Research objective
Given the importance of career research in the contemporary world of work context, the purpose of this study was to explore organisational career research trends by academia in South Africa from 1970 to 2011.Its purpose was also to evaluate these trends in terms of global and present national challenges that require empirical investigation in the contemporary, multi-cultural South African world of work context.
The research questions were as follows:

Potential value-add of the study
The increasingly complex contexts in which people have been pursuing their careers since the catalytic 1970s demand the continuous generation and development of knowledge for the benefit of the discipline and practice of careers.
Apart from the global changes that affect the nature of work and careers, the post-apartheid context of South African workplaces also poses unique career-related challenges to individuals and professional career counsellors.
The insights derived from the findings may be employed by academia and researchers when planning future research initiatives.Given the paucity of empirical work on career research trends in South Africa, the findings may provide preliminary insights that add to the body of knowledge concerned with the evolution of the field and professional practice in the South African context.

Literature review
According to Derr and Briscoe (2007), the concepts of career and career success (Hall, 1976) and the internal career orientations of people (Driver, 1980;Schein, 1977Schein, , 1996Schein, , 2006) ) were major themes in the international careers literature from the 1970s onwards.Information about adult life stage development (Levinson, 1978;Super, 1990) and the importance of work-life balance (Bailyn, 1977(Bailyn, , 1980) ) grew in intensity.In America, women's rights in the workplace, careers and affirmative action became popular themes in the 1970s and are even more so today (Derr & Briscoe, 2007).
The social context of careers and its boundary-less nature increasingly received attention (Arthur, Inkson & Pringle, 1999).Research on careers and organisations focused on planning, staffing, socialisation and mentoring as well as job enrichment issues (Derr & Briscoe, 2007).
In the 21st century, career research in organisations increasingly started to focus on succession planning, attracting, managing and retaining talent and high-potential employees (Conger & Fulmer, 2003;Derr & Briscoe, 2007;Derr, Briscoe & Buckner, 2002).(Creager, 2011).Chaichanasakul et al. (2011) established in their review that Super's Life Span/Development theories mostly drove research on developmental life stage studies.
• Research on the world of work: Studies focused on career dynamics in the workplace and the concept of the boundary-less career, employees' perceptions of career success, work and job satisfaction, work burnout, unemployment, work-related change, work-family interface and flexible work arrangements, mentoring, career mobility and work engagement.Some studies examined the workplace for lesbian and gay people, and the relationship between organisational heterosexism, citizenship behaviour and performance.Other themes focused on the Big Five personality traits and their relationship to various work-related constructs.The career decision processes of employed adults, career adjustment to change and workers coping with an uncertain and changing work situation were also examined.The role of work embeddedness in mediating the influence of negative events causing thoughts of leaving a job between job performance and organisational citizenship behaviours was also investigated.Some studies emphasised a vocational self-concept as an important aspect of career self-management in optimising current person-job fit.
Other studies focused on cohort differences relating to work (e.g. the perceived career needs of millennials and employees in the early adulthood phase of their careers) (Creager, 2011) (Creager, 2011).
These themes reflect the changing nature of the world of work and careers, which requires people to develop their career meta-competencies or psychological career resources that they require to design a meaningful life-career in an uncertain, more chaotic world of work (Schreuder & Coetzee, 2011).
Research in organisational career psychology in South Africa did not receive much attention from researchers in the early years between 1950 and 1970.According to a study by Schreuder and Coetzee (2010), covering the period from 1950 to 1979, only 10 scientific career-related research projects were published; between 1980 and 2008 there was a significant increase in career research and 233 articles were published in scientific journals.These figures include peerreviewed articles, and master's and doctoral dissertations.In the broader context, this represents only 10% of the total number of publications in industrial and organisational psychology from 1950 to 2008.Table 1 provides an overview of the core career-related research themes identified by the study of Schreuder and Coetzee (2010).

Present challenges for career research in South Africa
Apart from the global challenges posed to the career development of people in the 21st century, individuals pursuing careers in the post-apartheid South African multicultural work context, face the reality of dealing with issues and challenges relating specifically to affirmative action and employment equity policies.These policies provide greater career and job mobility opportunities to Black people and women in particular.Research on attracting, developing and retaining talented and scarce or critical skills staff from the equity pool will remain a concern for South African organisations in the foreseeable future (Coetzee, 2011).South Africa is an understudied population, and new knowledge and insights are required on the career experiences and needs of Black women and people with disabilities in particular.
The relationship between career development and socioeconomic and educational background, race or ethnicity, and gender needs attention, as a result of the crucial place this relationship occupies in optimal career development (Creager, 2011).Moreover, the prevalence of HIV and AIDS in South African workplaces and communities (DHET, 2010) needs continued research, focusing on how these affect the career development of people, their well-being and success.In addition, the following need to be facilitated by research initiatives: • youth employment • graduate employability • vocational guidance and skills development and induction to work as a vital bridge into productive and satisfying adulthood.
The unemployed South African youth also remain an area of great concern (DHET, 2010).Research by Crocetti, Palmonari and Pojaghi (2011) emphasises the importance of understanding the career development needs and life outlook of the emerging adult (young people aged between 18 and 28).They found that emerging adults (Arnett, 2000) who face the challenge of finding their own occupation earlier, or with a lower level of education, experienced less satisfaction in life and had a less positive future orientation than their peers with a higher educational level.They also appear to feel less equipped, than their peers, to deal with continuous changes in a labour market that increasingly requires highly specialised workers.These findings suggest the need for further empirical research in the South African work context.
The changing nature of work and careers in a multi-cultural and multi-generational work context has, for many people, made some motivational and career development theories less relevant.This, in turn, calls for new, more relevant theories and measures to encourage greater career agency and career self-management (Bergh, 2009).Creager (2011) advocates the need for research on culturally sensitive approaches to career counselling and assessment.

What will follow
In the next section, the research design for this paper will be elaborated on and the research approach and method will be covered.The results will then be presented and the findings discussed.The article concludes with a brief synopsis of the most important conclusions, limitations of the research design and recommendations for possible future research initiatives.

Research approach
A broad qualitative systematic review (Petticrew & Roberts, 2006) was undertaken.This approach allowed the researchers to gather, analyse, report and evaluate documented research evidence on organisational career psychology in terms of its relevance for inclusion in the database, and to categorise the data in terms of the dominant career psychology research sub-themes.

Research setting
In the context of the present study, the field of organisational career psychology was targeted to achieve the aim of the present study.The study was anchored in the academic domain and focused on documented research in the field of organisational career psychology in South Africa.

Researcher roles
As a result of the qualitative nature of the research, the researchers acted as the research tool.In an effort to ensure objectivity in the data analyses, the researchers remained constantly aware of their personal views and potential bias, and how such subjectivity might influence the objectivity and neutrality of the research findings.The 110 research articles were treated as the sources of data and the identified themes were treated as the data.

Data collection methods
A search was undertaken by means of an on-line information technology service, the South African Bibliographic Information Network (SABINET).Using 'career' as the keyword and within the context of the stated boundary of the research, the data included studies (N = 110) carried out during the past 40 years in organisational career psychology.The searches were conducted over a period of 12 months.

Recording of data
Databases were systematically reviewed and synthesised, using a pre-established categorisation framework (Creager, 2011;Esterberg, 2002;Petticrew & Roberts, 2006).Codes and labels were attached to emerging themes that fit in the categorisation framework.All data were retained for possible future scrutiny.The data were safely stored to protect them from loss, destruction and unauthorised access.

Data analyses
In line with an international study conducted by Creager (2011), a categorisation framework was established a priori.
Given this, the following six sub-themes of career psychology formed the basis for the categorisation framework used to synthesise the data: • research on issues of professional importance In line with recommendations from Esterberg (2002), the focused categorisation process entailed manually going through the sources of data, line by line, to identify the dominant themes and focusing on the key categories identified for the purposes of this research.

Strategies employed to ensure quality data
The objectivity and trustworthiness, of the data analysis process, were maximised by involving two researchers who were both experienced in systematic data analysis, making sure that they discussed their own possible biases throughout and continually looking for evidence that either contradicted or confirmed the themes.The average agreement rate was 98% (i.e.98% of the factors were allocated to the same theme categories by each researcher).As a form of researcher triangulation, comments from researchers on the evolution of and challenges in the career psychology field (Creager, 2011;Derr & Briscoe, 2007;Gunz & Peiperl, 2007;Krieshok et al., 2011;Obschonka et al., 2012;Savickas, 2011) were also considered in the interpretation of the findings.

Reporting
The results of the systematic review are presented in terms of the chosen categorisation framework.Descriptive statistics (% frequencies and core themes) are used to present the dominant research trends.

Findings
Table 2 provides an overview of general (South African) research in the careers field frequency trends from 1970 to 2011, within the six pre-determined research theme categories.The sub-themes identified for each of the six research themes emerged from a scientifically rigorous analysis of the 110 research articles that were published from 1970 to 2011, in the six South African scientific journals listed above.Due to the extent of the number of publications in each of these journals, only the themes and the sub-themes are reported here, without reference to specific sources and examples for the sake of scientific parsimony.All data were retained for possible future scrutiny.This approach is in agreement with the research approach followed by Schreuder and Coetzee (2010) to report findings of this nature and extent.

Theme 1: Issues of professional importance
Table 2 shows that research on themes in this category represented proportionally 7.3% (n = 8) of all the theme categories of the published articles.Core themes relating to issues of professional importance included: career counselling, career planning practices, career guidance system, and the profile of the industrial psychologist.

Theme 6: Organisational career interventions
Research on themes in this category proportionally represented only 5.4% (n = 6).Core themes included: career guidance system, addressing barriers to career advancement,

Discussion
This research critically reviewed dominant research trends from 1970 to 2011 in the careers field in the South African context, and evaluated these trends in terms of global and present national challenges that require empirical investigation in the contemporary South African world of work context.Overall, the findings indicate the lack of an evolving general trend of research focus areas in organisational career psychology over the years.
Proportionally, much of the research addressed issues pertaining to career theory and concepts and the world of work in the South African context.Similar to international trends (Creager, 2011), research on career concepts focused mostly on dynamics in the work setting, on concepts of job and career satisfaction and success, retention and career well-being issues (burnout, work engagement, subjective well-being), as well as on issues pertaining to the work and family interface.This trend seems to reflect the influence of the globally changing nature of work and careers on South African workplaces.However, considering that the changing nature of work and careers in a multi-cultural and multigenerational South African work context has, for many people, made some motivational and career development theories less relevant, more seems to be needed in the field of career theory research (Bergh, 2009).Chaichanasakul et al. (2011) also express a concern that the number of career theories from multicultural, cross-cultural, and international perspectives is extremely limited in the career research literature.
Although career assessment and technology proportionally also appear to have been amongst the dominant research focus areas, when evaluating the core themes and instruments discussed, more research seems to be needed in this area.Internationally, the career assessment field appears to continue to have a paucity of research on subjective assessments that can further career choice and development (Chaichanasakul et al., 2011;Creager, 2011;Hartung, 2010).Bergh (2009) posits that, in the post-apartheid South African multi-cultural workplace context, culture-free career assessment tests should be designed and tested, or refined and standardised.Creager (2011) also advocates the need for international research on culturally sensitive approaches to career counselling and assessment.
Research on developmental life stage issues, organisational career interventions and professional practice seem to be proportionally under-researched in the South African context.
In the light of the present employment and employability challenges faced by South African youth in the emerging adulthood phase (DHET, 2010), more research needs to be undertaken in this area.

Conclusion
In the light of the findings of this study it can be concluded that organisational career psychology research in South Africa seems to be lagging behind in terms of international trends in career psychology research focus areas.Moreover, organisational career research in South Africa appears to need revival and innovation in terms of addressing the needs and concerns posed by the global world of work and postapartheid, multicultural South African workplaces.
By the mid-1900s, Hall and Mirvis (1995) had already stated that the study of careers needed to become better connected to the career environment and become more multidisciplinary.Previous research on careers does not necessarily fit today's turbulent working environment.'Hence, the nature of the research will have to match the nature of its subject: rapidly changing, fast learning and complex' (Hall & Mirvis, 1995, p. 349).Moreover, being an applied discipline contributing to the psychology of working and living in a global posttraditional (new millennium) society, career research should bring innovative, relevant solutions that can be applied to the benefit of the career development issues that humans grapple with in their daily lives (Krieshok et al., 2011;Savickas, 2011).
Longitudinal, multi-year, career-related studies addressing the development of people across their lifespan are required (Creager, 2011).
In the light of the challenges posed by global and national career-related needs and concerns, it appears that more research is needed in the following research focus areas of organisational career psychology: • Transformation from jobs to jobless work.Employees are facing a number of employment transitions during their working lives.The digital revolution is changing the form of work and, therefore, demands that new questions should be asked by researchers.Long-term careers will still exist, but part-time and temporary work are increasing, wherein permanent jobs are being replaced by temporary assignments (Savickas, 2011).Career research should help determine the readiness of employees to adapt to the requirements of the evolving information society and what they need to successfully construct their careers in a boundary-less and jobless occupational world.• Due to the reality of jobless work (and temporary assignments), the focus is now on employability rather than employment.Employability requires specific skills from people, in which the employability of employees and students is to be determined.The focus should not be for an individual to maintain employment but to remain employable and to manage his or her career through adaptability, intentionality, life-long learning and autobiographical reasoning (Savickas, 2011).• Developing new career counselling models and theories relevant to the contemporary, multi-cultural working environment.• People work for longer.In the future there will be more people working beyond the normal retirement age of 65 years.This could be by choice or necessity.It is becoming more difficult for people to retire for financial reasons.An area of research could be to determine whether or not an individual's interests change beyond retirement, and the results could help senior people choose appropriate new careers in the later stages of their lives (Chope, 2011).• The career interests of emerging adults, especially those with disabilities, need to be investigated.Research has shown that people with disabilities rarely experience an optimal person-job fit as they are often misplaced, with no consideration of their interests and personality profiles in relation to the job profile (Turner, Unkefer, Chichy, Peper & Juang, 2011).• Taking the demands of the changing and existing working environment into account, predictors for career success remain an important research focus area.• Research focusing on working women has increased.
Areas that probably need more attention are the unique barriers to the career progression of women and the factors predicting their career success (Johnson & Eby, 2011).• More South African research is needed on the workfamily interface.Concepts such as work to family positive spill over and work to family enrichment need to be further investigated.Much that has been written on work-family conflict has a negative connotation, whilst the one domain (work or family) can also benefit from the positives of the other domain (Masuda, McNall, Allen & Nicklin, 2012).
The research should preferably be culture-related and more South African data are required.• Research to determine the relationship between dispositional variables and work family conflict can be considered.Research has provided insights into the dispositional variables that serve as risk factors, as well as those that appear to serve a protective purpose against work-family conflict (Allen et al., 2012).• Millions of people in South Africa are out of work.
What can career psychologists do to improve the lives of the unemployed and underemployed?Current career research seems mostly to focus on the middle class in the corporate world.

Limitations and recommendations for future research
The limitations of the present study should be interpreted in the light of the stated objective of the study.It should be pointed out that the present study was approached from an academic perspective and did not include unpublished research.Using the SABINET portal to access documented, published peer-reviewed research articles, from only six accredited South African journals, necessarily excluded other research-related national and international publications and unpublished research.Only two researchers were involved in the primary data analysis.Trustworthiness of the findings could have been maximised by involving additional independent researchers in the data analyses.Although it is recognised that reporting the findings of the present research was considerably limited by the journal requirements and the nature of the research study, the findings could have been strengthened by quoting specific references and research, as examples of the six research themes.
Notwithstanding these limitations, the findings provide valuable preliminary insights that add to the body of knowledge that focuses on the evolution of the field of organisational career psychology in South Africa.The insights derived from the findings can be employed by academia and researchers in the field to plan future research initiatives that will contribute to the profession and practice of career guidance and counselling in the post-apartheid multi-cultural, multi-generational South African workplace.Such research directions should take cognisance of the challenge for career psychology research to remain relevant to the issues and concerns posed by the 21st century world of work.

TABLE 1 :
Overview of South African career research themes in organisations from 1950 to 2008.

TABLE 2 :
Frequencies of the dominant career research themes in organisations from 1970 to 2011.