Relationship Between Leadership And Achievement Career

Career Aspirations and Leadership Aspirations

Discuss about the Relationship Between Leadership and Achievement Career.

There is no doubt that the workers of today have to continuously try to manage change that exists both in the environment and also in them. Workers have to do this due to the recent rapid quick changes that are now being witnessed in technology, organizations and also the society as a whole (Bateman & Crant, 1993). According to many experts, these rapid changes that are being felt almost everywhere in the world like the personality traits especially those that are thought to reflect some willingness that make individuals to change is actually what is driving both the competitive advantage for different organizations and also the success of people in different workplaces (Beaman, Duflo, Pande, & Topalova, 2012). It is widely believed that personality is what actually influences the work life success of many people today. Various reasons have been given to argue out such thinking. Particularly two reasons have been given to justify the statement which is;

• Careers are thought to be the outcome of developmental propensities that amass overtime.
• The working life is usually full of “fragile” circumstances where personality usually comes in handy especially for playing an overriding role in comportment selection.

Many contemporary career ideas are normally individual instead of institution or organization driven. Because of this reason, it makes the individual qualities to be linked to the self-direction factors in the success of any person in his or her career. It is important to note that up to now, there has not been publication or literature review concerning the personality traits of people (Brown & Donnell, 2011). Most of the literature review on the personality traits does not actually fit a profile that can make an individual to succeed in the ever changing society of the proactive personality.

There has been an evolution regarding of how the careers of women are measured today around the world. The women have now started selecting careers that were traditionally thought to be a reserve for men like engineering and management. Many countries around the world have been increasingly joining the labor force (Brown, Peus, Weisweiler, & Frey, 2013). The women have now stepped into different leadership roles proving to many that they can also succeed where men have been. Initially, most careers that women chose were dichotomously studied by various scholars around the world. They were studied as either having a career or homemaking orientation. The trend has now changed on how the women choose their career. The career choices of women are now studied by examining them in terms of family orientation versus degree of career, nontraditional versus traditional, nonprestigious versus prestigious and also in terms of occupational selection (Creed, Buys, Tilbury, & Crawford, 2013). Career aspirations can be defined as a person’s career related choices or goals.

Goal Positioning Perception and Learning Orientation

Aspirations are very important when it comes to the process of career selection. Our aspirations play a major role in determining the training and educational decisions that we make in life. Aspirations are very strongly linked to the future achievements and occupational selection of an individual (Fuller & Marler, 2009). Most of the time the career goals that we put in place are the ones that drive our striving behavior and the processes of our motivation. Our career goals help us to achieve many things in our life.

There are multiple levels that are usually considered in our career aspirations. Career goals help people to reflect on a particular work area for instance; an individual may have an aspiration to work in the healthcare sector or to be even more specific an individual may desire to work specifically as a medical practitioner. Career aspirations can also be considered along other dimensional multiples like; traditionality, lifestyle, the level of prestige, and finally the needed training (Brown, Peus, Weisweiler, & Frey, 2013). Career aspirations can also be taken as leadership aspirations due to their ability to reflect on the level of responsibility and authority that is most of the time desired in any career.

When we take a look at the career aspirations from a goal positioning perception, we notice that many people experience, behave, and interpret differently when it comes to achievement conditions. It depends on whether people adopt performance-prove learning or avoid-orientation. According to research, people endowed with a higher learning orientation will most probably want to set very challenging and difficult goals that they want to achieve (Gray & Brien, 2007). Such individuals do this because they believe that it is the best way of how they can properly develop their capital and competencies. People with a higher learning orientation look at their capability as a character that is flexible to them which enables them to have a higher learning orientation. These capabilities can best be developed and fostered by setting difficult challenges.

Most of the people that have a higher learning orientation accept as true that results are dependent on the amount of effort that one puts in what he or she does. Many of these individuals usually occupy themselves with matters like goal striving and planning (Jones, Paretti, Hein, & Knott, 2010). By involving themselves with such activities, these individuals increase their chances of achieving their set goals. Most of these individuals usually look at obstacles, poor performance, and setbacks as an opportunity to develop even more because they believe that they are more flexible to overcome all the challenges that are mentioned above (Jogulu, 2010). They interpret these challenges as a feedback to the efforts being applied in trying to achieve their set goals.

Personality

Many experts around the world describe personality as self-regulatory strategies and dispositions that are directly categorized under the support of the social-cognitive approach. Various experts have tried to explain the existence of the unique patterns of personal behaviors and thoughts (Jones, Paretti, Hein, & Knott, 2010). The experts have managed to do this by carrying out wider multiplicity of individual research. The experts have based their wide research on both the social-cognitive and dispositional traits of people.

The big five-factor models of personality have now become the most popular personality concept. The five-factor models of the personality concepts encompass; the dimensions of openness to experience, agreeableness, extraversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and emotional stability (Vandewalle, 1997). However, among the above mentioned personality traits, only two of them have been linked to the motivation to learn. The two traits include; neuroticism and conscientiousness. Research has proved that neuroticism is usually negatively associated to an individual’s motivation to learn while on the other hand conscientiousness is positively associated to an individual’s motivation.

Research has proved to us that individuals who are proactive have the ability to directly affect their situations, create change, and influence the environment that they live in. Most proactive individuals usually direct much of their efforts towards gaining some performance outcome (Jones, Paretti, Hein, & Knott, 2010). Scholars have been working tirelessly in trying to figure out some particular behaviors that different people use especially when it comes to increasing their performance. For about twenty years now, the scholars are still yet to figure out the behaviors. A good demonstration of the character traits of the proactive individuals is how they approach their careers and jobs differently from the other individuals who are not proactive.

Most of the proactive individuals always have a tendency to take full control of their careers and jobs. According to research, there is always a greater probability of proactive individuals to involve themselves in different career management matters like; finding organizational information, obtaining career support and sponsorship, job seeking, persisting in the face of challenging careers and at the same time trying to conduct a career planning (Joo & Park, 2010). Many proactive individuals will probably choose to pursue and identify any opportunities that come their way.

 They use such opportunities for self-improvement of their careers. Such opportunities are used by these individuals to further improve their skills and also acquire more education that they require to have to help them in future (Rodd, 2012). Proactive individuals perform better when it comes to looking for the latest information hence enabling them to identify very many opportunities to enhance their skills and education. They do not wait for opportunities and information to find them instead they go out of their way to make sure that they have the information that they need.

Proactive Behavior in Career Management

According to prior research, it has been strongly proven that any learning goal orientation always results into some positive benefits both in the workplace and classrooms. Learning goal orientation helps many individuals to improve their performance whether in the classroom or even at work (Kouzes & Posner, 2011). Teams can also apply the learning goal orientation to gain maximum achievements. Most of the positive work-associated results have always been linked to proactive personalities. Proactive personality is usually described as the probability of an individual undertaking a personal sacrifice to get a certain job done well. The main objective of the proactive personality is to capture a developmental tendency that aims at changing or enacting an individual’s environment (Rigoti, Schyns, & Mohr, 2008). There are many ways of how individuals influence the very environments that they live in. Some of these ways include;  

• Cognitive restructuring: it is a process where individuals appraise, perceive, and construe their environment.
• Evocation; this is a process where reactions are evoked unintentionally from other people hence altering the environment.
• Selection; it is a process which occurs as a consequence of people choosing certain situations that they want to participate in.
• Manipulation; it is a process that consists of an individual’s efforts that aim to alter, change, shape, or exploit his or her interpersonal environment.

Conclusion

It is important to know that the process of proactive can also occur at other levels like organizations and groups. Organizations should encourage proactiveness to have the best team that is capable of scaling the success in the various departments that exist in the organization. By embracing and encouraging a proactive team, organizations will be able to effectively manage all the important interface units that exist in the organization. Effective teams in organizations should always try to engage in activities that aim to proactively influence the outside teams with which they are interdependent. Organizations should come up with prospectors that will enable them to emphasize change, innovation, and also search the environment for new opportunities. It is important for businesses, individual marketers to come up with great strategies that aim at managing the environment in a proactive manner.

References

Brown, S & O’Donnell, E 2011, ‘Proactive personality and goal orientation: a model of directed effort’, Journal of Organisational Culture, Communication and Conflict, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 103-119.

Creed, P, Buys, N, Tilbury, C & Crawford, M 2013, “The relationship between goal orientation and career striving in young adolescents’, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, vol. 43, no. 7, pp. 1480-1490.

Fuller, B & Marler, LE 2009, ‘Change driven by nature: a meta-analytic review of the proactive personality literature’, Journal of Vocational Behavior, vol. 75, no. 3, pp. 329-345.

Bateman, S & Crant, JM 1993, ‘The proactive component of organizational behaviour: a measure and correlates’, Journal of Organizational Behavior, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 103-118.

Gray, MP &O’Brien, KM 2007, ‘Advancing the assessment of women’s career choices: the Career Aspiration Scale’, Journal of Career Assessment, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 317-337.

Rigotti, T, Schyns, B & Mohr, G 2008, ‘A short version of the Occupational Self-Efficacy Scale: structural and construct validity across five countries’, Journal of Career Assessment, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 238-255.

Vandewalle, D 1997, ‘Development and validation of a work domain goal orientation instrument’, Educational and Psychological Measurement, vol. 57, no. 6, pp. 995-1015.

Beaman, L., Duflo, E., Pande, R. and Topalova, P., 2012. Female leadership raises aspirations and educational attainment for girls: A policy experiment in India. science, 335(6068), pp.582-586.

Jones, B.D., Paretti, M.C., Hein, S.F. and Knott, T.W., 2010. An analysis of motivation constructs with first?year engineering students: Relationships among expectancies, values, achievement, and career plans. Journal of Engineering Education, 99(4), pp.319-336.

Kouzes, J.M. and Posner, B.Z., 2011. Credibility: How leaders gain and lose it, why people demand it (Vol. 244). John Wiley & Sons.

Jogulu, U.D., 2010. Culturally-linked leadership styles. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 31(8), pp.705-719.

Rodd, J., 2012. Leadership in early childhood. McGraw-Hill Education (UK).

Braun, S., Peus, C., Weisweiler, S. and Frey, D., 2013. Transformational leadership, job satisfaction, and team performance: A multilevel mediation model of trust. The Leadership Quarterly, 24(1), pp.270-283.

Joo, B.K. and Park, S., 2010. Career satisfaction, organizational commitment, and turnover intention: The effects of goal orientation, organizational learning culture and developmental feedback. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 31(6), pp.482-500.