Role of Career Anchors for Innovative Behaviors at Workplace

The organizations of today are undergoing a metamorphosis. Whether one thinks of it as downsizing, rightsizing, flattening, becoming a learning organization, or simply as transformations into something as yet unknown, no one would challenge that profound changes are occurring worldwide. These changes in the occupational environment have implications for career development in the future. Will there ever be such a concept as an organizational career or will careers become a more fragmented set of jobs held together far more by what has been labeled as “internal career”. The concept of internal career here means the subjective sense of where one is going in one’s work life, in contrast with the “external career,” the formal stages and roles that are defined by organizational policies and societal concepts of what an individual can expect in the occupational structure. The concept of Career Anchors which includes Autonomy/Independence, Security/Stability, Technical/functional competence, General managerial competence, Entrepreneurial creativity, Service/Dedication to a cause, Pure Challenge and Lifestyle becomes more vital in today’s turbulent world as more people are laid off in the frenzy of down-sizing and have to figure out what to do next in their lives. Based on this review the second part of this study deals with a set of testable prepositions developed to explore the relation of gender, type of industry and experience of Pakistani manager’s knowledge levels on Career Anchors. Most of the previous work on Career Anchors has been done in the western settings. The present study addresses this gap by proposing the middle managers belonging to the banking, health, telecom and education sector of Pakistan to become the respondents for the empirical investigation of this research.