Unlocking hospitality managers career transitions through applying Schein’s career anchors theory

Purpose: This paper seeks to unlock the career transitions of hospitality managers through applying Schein’s career anchors theory. It aims to understand how Schein’s Career Anchors help explain the career transitions of managers in the Scottish hospitality industry Design: The paper adopts an experiential design. All twenty-two hospitality managers who participated in the study completed an online version of Schein’s Career Anchors containing 40 items covering all eight career anchors. The career histories of participants were then gathered through use of a semi-structured interview design. Comparisons were then drawn across the career anchor classification and the data on career transitions collected from participants. Findings: The results highlight the continued relevance of Schein’s Career Anchors theory and indicate that Schein’s career anchor theory may constitute a useful tool for understanding hospitality managers’ career needs and engaging in meaningful career planning. Originality/Value: The study provides a useful insight into hospitality manager career motivations and knowledge of career anchors will help hospitality organisations more effectively engage, recruit and retain hospitality managers.


Anchors Theory
Interest in the careers of hospitality managers has grown considerably in recent years, with much attention focusing on how to develop, motivate and retain managers in a dynamic competitive environment.Historically, the issue of career management and career development has been largely neglected within the hospitality industry, with research identifying the need to develop clearly identifiable career paths and the strategic management of talent in the industry (Davidson et al., 2011;Ko, 2012;Lucas and Deery, 2004;Nachmias and Walmsley, 2015).
Highly capable hospitality managers are considered to be a rare breed due to their ability to balance operational, social, human resource and financial goals, ensuring the continued viability of their establishments (Gursoy and Swanger, 2005;Nebel and Ghei, 1993;Suh et al., 2012).
Despite the hospitality industry's reputation for long unsociable hours, low salaries and high stress and burnout levels, Mkono (2010) reports that a considerable number of hospitality workers and managers remain in the industry for decades and display high levels of contentment and job satisfaction.
Research in relation to career mobility and transitions in the hospitality industry has highlighted the importance of personal needs and values as managers seek to achieve autonomy, life balance and meaning in their work (Houran et al., 2013;Wrzniewski et al., 2003).The longevity and durability of Schein's Career Anchors theory owes much to its ability to predict organisational commitment, job satisfaction and personal effectiveness when individuals achieve congruence between their career anchor and their work (Coetzee et al., 2007;Danziger and Valency, 2006;Kniveton, 2004).For their part, Ituma and Simpson (2007) describe a career anchor as a constellation of self-perceived attitudes, values, needs and talents that develop over time and guide career choices and transitions.Thus, career anchors provide a helpful foundation to explore individual career choices and look at how individuals respond to different career opportunities (Coetzee and Schreuder, 2013;Joāo and Coetzee, 2011).This paper sets out to examine the career transitions of hospitality managers through the lens of Schein's career anchors theory.This theory helps to understand the career choices of hospitality managers through looking at their values, motives, needs and orientation towards work and life.The primary data was collected through profiling participants' career anchors and seeking evidence of such anchors in the career histories of participants.The discussion section identifies the theoretical contribution of the study and outlines the implications for future research and practice.

Hospitality Management Careers
The hospitality industry represents a unique environment for studying management careers and transitions.Despite its size and importance to the overall economy, the sector is associated with long unsociable hours, poor working conditions, low pay, low skills and lack of career opportunities (Maxwell et al., 2010;O'Leary and Deegan, 2005).The hospitality industry is characterised by a range of management roles as well as organisational types, sizes, ownership and geographic spread (Slattery, 2002;Watson, 2008), offering various opportunities to managers to develop their careers.According to both Rydzik et al. (2012) and Baum (2002), hospitality work exhibits diversity in both horizontal and vertical terms: in a horizontal sense it includes a wide range of jobs from accommodation, food and beverage, front desk, leisure, entertainment, reservation call centres, events, sales, office administration and IT systems management.In a vertical sense it is represented by a more traditional classification that ranges from unskilled to semi-skilled, and from skilled to supervisory and management.
Studies examining hospitality management careers have consistently highlighted the importance of soft skills in fostering a supportive, service-oriented, customer-focused culture (Sisson and Adams, 2013;Wilks and Hemsworth, 2011).For their part, Victorino et al. (2005) argue that customers are demanding more innovative service offerings that fit with their individual preferences and tastes -hence, the need for better trained and customer-focused managers.Many commentators have noted that a positive organisational hospitality culture is characterised by strong family values, highlighting social interaction, cooperation, loyalty, belonging, mutual support and collegiate environment (Ingram, 2005;Kyriakidou and Gore, 2005;Watson, 2008).Such a culture calls for employees and managers who are service-minded and who possess the competencies, attitudes, personalities and values to meet customer and service standard expectations (Johns et al., 2007).Meeting such elevated demands requires an increasingly sophisticated approach to recruiting managers who can fulfil rising customer expectations and become effective role models to employees.
Traditionally the hospitality industry has been recognised as one in which employees can work their way up to top level management positions (Harper et al., 2005).However, with increased competition, the nature of the hospitality industry has changed over the last few years and the individualisation of the employment relationship has challenged the concept of long term careers within one organisation (Ladkin and Riley, 1996;Lub et al., 2012).It has been argued that career patterns in the hospitality industry are likely to involve a high rate of mobility, as transferability of skills is high and there is considerable functionalization and specialisation within the industry (Harper et al., 2005).In relation to mobility issues, it has been suggested that hotel managers are involved in some form of self-directed career planning and are the primary initiators of job moves (Wang, 2013).Research on personal strategies used by hotel managers in career advancement by Anakwe et al. (2000) and by Akrivos et al. (2007) found that most managers kept themselves informed of the opportunities in the company, did not wait to be told about promotion prospects, were flexible and adaptable to changes, always put their career first and tried to improve their skills, knowledge and experience in order to advance in their careers.
Managers within the hospitality sector have long been affected by a poor overall quality of working life (Kara et al., 2013;Ladkin, 1999a;Lee et al., 2015).Research shows that hospitality managers score significantly higher in life stress factors than other industry managers (Hu and Cheng, 2010;Ladkin, 1999a).Poor management, lack of delegation and managers over commitment at work can lead to job burnout amongst hotel managers (O'Neill and Davis, 2011).
Factors such as role ambiguity, difficult customers, lack of autonomy and work overload are the main stress precursors which leads to stress being one of the main reasons so many hospitality employees leave the industry each year (Kim et al., 2007).
Career progression and pathways within the hospitality sector are not always clearly defined, with commentators focusing on the steps involved in acquiring the general manager position.Research by Harper et al. (2005) and Garavan et al. (2006) has shown that operational experience is invaluable to upward career progression.Harper et al. (2005) also found that formally qualified individuals achieved a general management status almost three years earlier than their unqualified counterparts.To achieve the position of general manager, Nebel et al. (1995) concluded that it took managers, on average 8.9 years.Similar research by Ladkin and Riley (1996) discovered that it took roughly six job moves in roughly ten years to achieve that position.Such research highlights the importance of building a portfolio of skills and experience across a range of departments and hotels to achieve upward progression to the general manager position.Watson (2008) argues in this regard, that the sector tends to prioritise technical rather than managerial skills, with a preference towards hiring people with strong practical skills.

Schein's Career Anchors Theory in a Hospitality Context
With a wide diversity of roles within the industry, it is argued that the use of Schein's career anchors theory may help hospitality organisations achieve a better person-job fit, improving both productivity and customer service.Both Garavan et al. (2006) and Beck and La Lopa (2001) have shown that career anchors have good applicability to a range of roles across the hospitality sector.In the former case, Garavan et al. (2006) found that hotel general managers had two pronounced career anchors: a desire to manage people and an emphasis on service and dedication.In the latter case, Beck and La Lopa (2001) found that hotel general managers are often marked out by a general management career anchor, desiring to achieve proficiency across a range of skills, compared to food and beverage managers who often possessed a technical career anchor, preferring to work in complex hotel food and beverage operations.Thus, it can be argued that Schein's career anchor theory gives hospitality employees an insight into their career values and motives as well as helping them develop career plans, goals and aspirations (Igbaria et al., 1999).
Edgar Schein suggested that the concept of career is a link between individuals and the organisations for which they work, viewed from both an external and an internal perspective (Igbaria et al., 1999).He divided organisational career into internal and external careers, where the first one is "the formal stages and roles that are defined by organisational policies and societal concepts of what an individual can expect in the occupational structure", and second "the self image that employees build up of their own work life and its relationship to their personal and family concerns" (Schein, 1990a, p. 1).Based on the concept of internal careers Schein developed the career anchors theory which relates to the motivational, attitudinal and valued syndromes which guide and constrain a person's career (Schein, 1974).The career anchor concept was developed after decades of longitudinal research on how individuals defined themselves in relation to their work by following their job histories and looking for the reasons behind their career decisions.Career anchors emerged as a way of explaining the reason behind career decisions and it allows for a much broader view of an individual's values around their career to be considered (Steele and Francis-Smythe, 2007;Yarnall, 1998).Schein (1974) suggested career anchors are linked to the values and motives a person uses when forced to make a choice, and not to the personalities and aptitudes one takes into consideration when choosing a career.Thus an individual who works as a marketing entrepreneur may have more similarities with engineering entrepreneurs than with marketing professors or marketing research specialists (Feldman and Bolino, 1996).Although research has been able to establish some links between occupations and anchors, this was not intended by Schein in his research (Kniveton, 2004).
Research on career anchors showed that most people saw themselves in terms of eight categories: (1) technical or functional competence; (2) general management competencies; (3) security and stability; (4) entrepreneurial creativity; (5) autonomy and independence (6) service and dedication to a cause; (7) pure challenge and (8) life style (Schein, 1990b).Originally, the idea behind the career anchor theory was that only one anchor dominated, but further research recognised that this may be too simplistic and individuals may have multiple anchors where one is more dominant (Feldman and Bolino, 1996;Suutari and Taka, 2004).Career anchors are not present on first entry into the workplace, but are developed through occupational experience, from which employees learn what their talents, motives and abilities really are (Igbaria et al., 1999).Feldman and Bolino (1996) reconceptualised Schein's eight career anchors into three different groupings: talent based (management competence, technical/functional competence and entrepreneurial creativity), need based (security and stability, autonomy and independence and life style) and value based anchors (pure challenge and service and dedication to a cause).

Research Questions
The following questions were advanced to guide this empirical study: 1. Does knowledge of Schein's Career Anchors help explain the career transitions of managers in the Scottish hospitality industry?2. Through knowledge of Schein's Career Anchors, how can hospitality organisations improve career enhancement and career development of managers?

Methodology
This section gives an overview of the research design and provides detail on the participants involved in the study, the instruments used and data analysis.

Participants
A total of twenty-two hospitality managers participated in the study.Each of the hospitality managers had been employed in a management position for at least five years.
Managers were selected across a range of three-star and four-star hotels in Edinburgh, Scotland.
A breakdown of the profile of participating managers is provided in table 1.
-Insert Table 1 here -Prior to data collection, ethical approval for the study was sought and granted.All participants signed consent forms and were provided with information sheets explaining the general purpose of the study and stating that participation was voluntary.Participants were assured of anonymity and confidentiality in relation to participation in the study.

Instruments and Data Analysis
An experiential qualitative design was employed to gather data for the purpose of examining hospitality managers' careers through the lens of Schein's Career Anchors theory.
Participants were asked to complete an online version of Schein's Career Anchors containing 40 items covering all eight career anchors (Schein, 1990b).Sample items included: "I am most fulfilled in my career when I have been able to use my talents in the service of others" and "Security and Stability are more important to me than freedom and autonomy."This allowed was used to accurately determine the dominant career anchors of participants and classify participants as falling within the talent-based, need-based or value-based anchor groupings (Feldman and Bolino, 1996).Once the dominant career anchors of participants were established, the career histories of participants were gathered through use of a semi-structured interview design.During the interviews, details were also collected related to the gender, nationality, age, marital status and educational qualifications of participants.Each interview took between 45 minutes and 90 minutes.The choice of career history analysis has been defended by Ladkin (2000) and Gunz and Jalland (1996) as being a successful technique to examine patterns and processes in managerial transitions.It is preferred to a longitudinal approach because of the high costs which the former involves and the difficulties in carrying large scale longitudinal studies as participants are frequently lost in the survey over time (Ladkin, 1999b).Career analysis has the purpose of exploring the nature of work and particular jobs, environment change and its impact on certain careers, personal characteristics and skills of people in selected jobs (Steele, 2003).

Results
In order to examine the relationship between an individual's career anchor and their career transitions, the results section is organised following Feldman and Bolino's (1996) categorisation of the eight career anchors into talent-based, needs-based and value-based anchors.Table 2 defines each of the eight career anchors and provides extracts from the interviews to support evidence of career anchors in the career histories of participants.The data provides good evidence of linkages between the career anchors of participants and the career decisions and transitions made by participants.

Talent Based Career Anchors
The talent based career anchors category comprises of participants who hold management competence, technical/functional competence and entrepreneurial creativity career anchors.The data collected through the interviews suggests that managers possessing career anchors in this category are more likely to adopt a strategic approach to their careers and their goal is to build a portfolio of career experiences towards achieving their ultimate goal.Status is particularly important for this group of individuals as they are keen to develop expertise in their particular area of interest.They are likely to take a highly instrumentalist, self-directed approach to their careers and exhibit a greater level of career mobility than other participants.Excerpts from the interviews and data presented in Table 2 shows that loyalty to the organisation appeared secondary to the individual's drive to attain valued career outcomes.In this regard, managers may be more likely to take risks with their careers in order to grasp exciting opportunities or acquire specialist experience.Managers with a general management competence anchor identified that, knowledge of finance, yield and revenue management is becoming increasingly important for progression to general manager.The desire to accumulate experience across different cultures and departments is expressed by one manager in the following terms: "In my career, I have tried to gain experience of the top countries in Europe: UK, Germany and France…one of the major transitions in my career was the step to housekeeping manager.It wasn't planned, but it was nice because I had the chance to develop a team, to start from zero in a new hotel opening.The hotel was based in a small village and the staff were largely inexperienced, so the chance to build everything from zero was very satisfying."

Male, Argentina, 38 years old, Hospitality Degree
Managers with a technical/functional competence were keen to develop their skills fully, but may often opt to remain within a particular functional area.Specialisation is a key driver for individuals with a technical/functional career anchor as they seek to achieve success from full utilisation and leveraging of their skills.This fits with Beck and La Lopa's (2001) research which argued that managers with a technical/functional career anchor seek high levels of challenge within their skill area and strive to be the very best that they can be within their specific area of expertise.Describing his need to strive for higher levels of achievement and continuous learning, one manager commented: Managers possessing an entrepreneurial creativity anchor were eager to engage in experimentation and examine new possibilities for improving service delivery and the customer experience.Success for many of the managers was an indication of their own abilities and their capacity to identify and seize upon available opportunities.Danziger and Valency (2006) maintain that managers motivated by entrepreneurial creativity will possess a desire to create something that is entirely their own project and will be interested in implementing new ideas, rather than managing existing one.This desire to apply new ideas was expressed by one manager in the following terms:

Need Based Career Anchors
Managers in the need based career anchors category hold security and stability, autonomy and independence, or lifestyle career anchors.These individuals are determined to carve out a career that fits with their particular internal need for independence or security/stability or allows them to lead a particular lifestyle outside of the work environment.By analysing the data collected during the interviews it was noted that individuals with a security and stability career anchor tended to stay longer within particular hotels, viewing colleagues as family and the hotel and its brand values as an extension of their own personality.This is supported by Schein (1990b) who describes these individuals as more concerned with the context of the work than the nature of the job itself and who obtains self-satisfaction from identifying with their organisations.
While such individuals may shift and move jobs internally, they are less likely to move to an external organisation.One manager describes the struggles she experienced moving to a job in the financial services sector, which eventually led her to return to the familiar working environment of the hospitality sector: "At one point, I went to work at a bank.I couldn't settle, I was hopping about on the seat.I got a lot of praise for the job I was doing, but the daily routine was so different compared to hospitality.That job gave me time out and an opportunity to reflect and afterwards, I moved back to hospitality."

Female, UK, 34 years old, Secondary Education
Meanwhile, managers with an autonomy and independence career anchor seek to take greater ownership and control over their careers.They look to overcome obstacles and challenges and resent being told that they are incapable of achieving.This fits with Schein's (1990b) view of the autonomy and independence career anchor where individuals with this anchor need to feel above all else that they are free; they want work with clearly defined goals but work that leaves the means of accomplishment up to them.This drive to retain freedom and independence was expressed by one manager in the following terms: "Every time in my career when somebody's said I can't do something, that's always been the red rag for the bull… it's always been about proving people wrong and proving myself right… I suppose the only thing that I regret is moving every two years.I don't like putting my wife and my son through it."

Male, UK, 41 years old, Unfinished University Degree
Excerpts from the interviews found in Table 2 show that managers holding a lifestyle career anchor reported frustration with the unsociable hours and family unfriendly patterns of the industry.These managers either negotiated with hotel management to structure their hours or moved to a position within the hotel with clear bounded working time.Such managers often sacrificed promotion or career progression in order to retain control over their working environment.One manager with a lifestyle career anchor described a career move from London to Edinburgh in the following terms: "Edinburgh is home.My partner is a chef and we were both working ridiculously hard in London.We felt like we were on a treadmill -fast and scary and we wanted to get out of London and settle down.We saw Edinburgh as a good opportunity to settle down and preferred the lifestyle in Edinburgh."

Value Based Career Anchors
The value based career anchors category included managers with either a pure challenge or service and dedication to a cause career anchor.Although other researchers have found that the number of people showing up with these anchors is increasing (Akhtar, 2011) none of the twenty-two managers who participated in the study possessed a service and dedication to a cause career anchor and only two were found to have a pure challenge anchor.The service and dedication to a cause anchor refers to individuals that have the desire to improve the world and help society, they are more concerned to work in a field that meets their values rather than their skills (Kniveton, 2004).
The managers who were classified as holding a pure challenge career anchor appeared to take satisfaction from solving difficult problems and proactively developing new systems and processes to improve levels of productivity across the organisation.Variety of experiences and problem-solving opportunities were instrumental to keeping such managers motivated and engaged in the workplace.Watson (2008) argues that many managers are attracted to the industry due to its diversity and complexity.One manager expressed his dissatisfaction with the lack of job variety, when he moved to a role outside of the hospitality sector: (on working in hospital kitchen) "I absolutely hated it.I didn't feel it was useful for me personally.It was a situation where the chefs and the main kitchen did not design food to meet the needs of patients.It was all standardised.There was no real attention to patients needs.It was a cop-out and I had to think about what I wanted to do next."

Conclusion
The study highlights the continued relevance and resilience of Schein's Career Anchors Theory in understanding the needs and motivations of managers in the hospitality industry.In line with Schein's (1990a, p. 2)  related choices", our study identified, that career transitions can often be explained by a manager seeking to fulfil their needs and motivation in accordance with their career anchor.
The study emphasises the strong potential for using Schein's career anchors in developing customised career pathways for hospitality managers.While previous research has simply highlighted the importance of fulfilling personal needs and values (Houran et al., 2013;Wrzniewski et al., 2003), this study, through the use of a career histories approach, finds strong evidence that career transitions are strongly affected by the needs and motives of individual managers.
Supporting Garavan et al. (2006) and Beck and La Lopa's (2001) work, the study identified the hospitality industry as a broad sector encompassing a wide range of roles and career anchors.For individuals possessing talent based career anchors, work becomes an outlet for developing and leveraging their skills.Confirming Ladkin and Riley's (1996) study, managers with a general management competence adopted a more instrumental approach to their careers, focusing on accumulating experience across hotels, cultures and departments.Likewise, managers with technical/functional needs focused on developing expertise in a specialist area and sought out opportunities to apply their skills at a very high level.
In terms of needs based career anchors, several individuals in our study were found to possess a security and stability career anchor.Traditionally, the hospitality sector has been characterised as a dynamic competitive sector, yet managers in our study with a security and stability career anchor often possessed strong loyalty to a particular hotel brand or establishment and had built up strong relational capital with management within a specific hotel.Despite the hospitality industry possessing a reputation for a poor overall quality of working life, with managers reporting higher stress levels than in other sectors (Hu and Cheng, 2010;Kara et al., 2013;Lee et al., 2015), the study found evidence of some participants possessing lifestyle career anchors.Interestingly, the participants in our study possessing a lifestyle anchor were found in either front of house or sales positions, where they had negotiated a particular work schedule to accommodate their other commitments.These findings suggest that the hospitality sector also offers suitable career perspectives for managers with career anchors which would not traditionally be expected to suit a highly dynamic and stressful environment.
The fast-paced, changeable nature of the hospitality sector means however, that it is an attractive industry for managers with a pure challenge career anchor.Such managers were clearly attracted to the variety of roles, activities and customers that can be found within hospitality, allowing them the opportunity to develop new processes or product offerings.
Through employing Schein's Career Anchors Theory, hospitality organisations will be better able to achieve a good person-job fit for vacancies within the industry as well as engage in meaningful career planning with managers.Understanding the motives and desires of hospitality managers will help hotels motivate their staff and put in place realistic career structures, which may give managers greater job variation and satisfaction.Aligning jobs to meet the internal needs of managers will arguably result in higher productivity and job satisfaction.From a manager's perspective, understanding their own career anchors can help individuals become more self-aware and better negotiate their career paths and career development.Primarily excited by the opportunity to analyse or solve problems under conditions of incomplete information and uncertainty; likes harnessing people together to achieve common goals; stimulated by crisis situations "A manager is not somebody who just manages the business, so I'm always trying to develop my leadership skills, to develop the business and the profitability further and further.I also enjoy the challenges because they're all new challenges."

Male, UK, 56 years old, Higher National Diploma Entrepreneurial Creativity
Primarily motivated by the need to build or create something that is entirely their own project; easily bored and likes to move from project to project; more interested in initiating new enterprises than in managing existing ones "If I'm not a hotel manager in 5 years, I am gonna get out.If that happens, I will go back to basics and revisit my career goals.I really need to find a hotel company to fulfill my desires and ambitions."

Security and Stability
Primarily motivated by job security or attachment to one organisation, willing to conform and to be fully socialised into an organisations values and norms; tends to dislike travel and relocation."I worked for the company for 6 years moving around from job to job all over the country and I realised I wasn't particularly happy.So I made a personal decision rather than a career based one and decided to move back to Scotland and take the job which would offer me the most stability and security" Male, UK, 32 years old, University Degree

, Turkey, 32 years old, College Education
learned what I can bring to the hospitality culture and I started to implement new initiatives.One hotel in the group had a big staff turnover.I went in and implemented a new structure to tackle the turnover issue and the new structure started delivering results and retention started improving.In another hotel in Edinburgh, I realised we weren't competitive in our food and beverage operationsand I decided to scrap the lunch and dinner options and had to reduce staff numbers as we were surrounded by cafes and restaurants.Some staff were shifted to other hotels and we diverted lunch and dinner budget towards delivering the best breakfast experience possible and it worked well."Male explanation that "a person's career anchor is the evolving selfconcept of what one is good at, what one's needs and motives are, and what govern one's work

Table 2 : Definition of Career Anchors and Evidence of Career Anchors in the Career of Participants Career Anchor Definition Sample Quote Talent Based Career Anchors Technical
Functional CompetencePrimarily excited by the content of the work itself; prefers advancement only in his/her technical or functional area of competence; generally disdains or fears general management as being too political "I say continuous learning is key and it is each individual's responsibility, because the higher up you go, the more you have to know about all the different departments" Male