Careers CAR

The symposium's goal is to raise a scholarly conversation about the economic value of individual self-managed career behavior, and what this can mean for organizations. Specifically, we are interested in what self-managed career behavior can mean for the practice of HRM and its implications for employees. The symposium responds to the growing interest among management scholars in increasingly agentic behavior of contemporary employees. The incorporation of such terms as "structuration" (Barley, 1989), "enactment" (Weick, 1996) and "entrepreneuring" (Rindova et al., 2009) into the mainstream literature suggest a degree of worker influence over, rather than mere responsiveness to, HRM systems. Moreover, limited but increasingly growing empirical evidence has begun to show how organizations can benefit from such career behavior. To achieve the symposium's goal, contributions offer (i) a fresh perspective to understanding the "psychological contract" between individuals and organizations, (ii) an argument about the "value" of mobility after an international assignment (iii) a career-centered approach to "smart" job design, (iv) a contextual, global perspective on the role of HRM, and (iv) empirical evidence on the effects of self-managed career behavior on organizational learning. Most importantly, the symposium offers a platform for scholarly conversation among peers (both researchers and practitioners) that can positively influence management research in the near future. In particular, we seek this conversation among Human Resources, Organizational Behavior, and Management Education and Development divisions, as those most concerned with how management can respond to the shift in individual career behavior at work.