CAREER PROACTIVITY: A PROCESS OF EVENTS ANTICIPATING OR PLANNING?

Abstract

Researches on career proactivity face difficulties
due to the reluctance of individuals to plan for their
professional future. Career planning seems to be an
obligation that employees meet more or less consentingly, in order to satisfy managerial expectations. This initial observation led us to present an
alternative conceptualization of career proactivity.
Beside the usual perspective, which mainly considers proactivity as a planning process, another perspective consists in presenting proactivity mainly as
an anticipatory process (Grant et Ashford, 2008 ;
Bindl et Parker, 2010 ; Fuller et al., 2012). Based on
these two conceptual approaches and on interviews
with a sample of twenty-five engineers, this paper
aims to deeper understand proactive career behaviors. This qualitative study, drawing on the critical
incident method, leads to a better understanding of
the proactive anticipation process. The results show
that, in an unstable and unpredictable professional
world, this “anticipatory approach” is probably
more workable that the planning approach.