Robert Hogan and Ryne A. Sherman
HOGAN ASSESSMENT SYSTEMS
Alfred North Whitehead once observed that all philosophy is an extended footnote to Plato. In the same way, we think that the modern study of vocational interests can be seen as an extended footnote to John Holland. Building on that metaphor, this chapter makes four points. First, Freud argued (correctly in our view) that the big problems in life concern choosing a mate and choosing a vocation, and that we never do either for rational reasons. Mainstream psychology spends vast amounts of time studying romantic relationships, and almost no time studying careers. However, a successful career usually potentiates a person’s romantic prospects. Given the life-defining importance of vocational psychology, and the robust body of research supporting its major claims, we find it puzzling that (quoting Holland, 1976) “The interest literature still remains largely outside the mainstream of psychology” (p. 523). For example, few people at the annual meetings of the Society of Industrial/Organizational Psychology or Society for Personality and Social Psychology know John Holland’s work. The first point of this essay, therefore, is to offer some suggestions for raising the profile of vocational psychology within academic psychology. Second, Holland regarded his RIASEC model as a contribution to personality psychology. We expand on this theme by analyzing the relationship between needs, values, interests, traits, and personality theory. That they are all related is seen in the following observation: “Personality… and such related constructs as values and interests—in some sense defines psychology for it is in the framing of the internal world of people that differentiates psychology from all others sciences. Personality conjures up thoughts about needs that people attempt to gratify (e.g., Maslow, 1954), the preferences people have for behaving in ambiguous or relatively unstructured situations (e.g., McCaulley, 1990), and the internal enduring interests and values of people that serve as guides or standards for their behavior (e.g., Holland, 1997)” (Schneider & Smith, 2004, p. 347). Third, vocational interest measures tell us about peoples’ career aspirations, but to realize their aspirations, people must first be able to get a job. We describe a model of employability and argue that employability is an important part of vocational psychology. Finally, aspiring to and being employed in a particular vocation is no guarantee that a person will be successful in that vocation. In our judgment, the field of vocational psychology would be further enriched by focusing on the determinants of career success—in addition to the traditional focus on career fit. We offer some observations regarding generic determinants of career success. Attention to these issues should broaden the appeal of vocational psychology as a discipline.
We begin by reviewing two conceptual/definitional issues. First, it is important to note that the terms values, needs, and interests are closely related—they are motivational terms that refer to the goals of peoples’ actions. Although “values” are the most general and inclusive construct, Dawis (1980) argued that values are the same as beliefs (Allport, 1961), attitudes (Campbell, 1971), interests (Allport, 1961), and preferences (Katzell, 1964). The point is that psychologists use these terms interchangeably (and a bit carelessly). Values, needs, and interests differ primarily in their level of abstraction. Super (1973) defines needs as the most abstract, and suggests that values and interests are lower level constructs derived from needs. Values, says Super, are the generalized objectives that we seek in order to satisfy needs; interests are the specific activities through which people achieve their values and satisfy their needs. According to Super, then, interests are the least abstract/most concrete motivational terms. Dawis (1980) suggests that values, needs, and interests all reflect an “affective orientation” toward objects in the world, and like Super, he suggests the same hierarchical arrangement, with attitudes at the top, values and needs in the middle, and interests at the lowest and most concrete level. Thus, both Super and Dawis regard interests as the most concrete construct in the hierarchy of motivation terms.
Values, needs, and interests can be organized in terms of a hierarchy of abstraction, but the relations among them are poorly thought out. A person might value health, need exercise, and be interested in tennis; this seems to be a logical progression, but vocational interest researchers have shown little interest in making the connections. But to be very clear, the point we are trying to make is that values are the real underlying subject matter of vocational psychology. Values are the fundamental unit of individual differences inside the person.1 They shape our understanding of the world and reflect our philosophy of life. Values drive us toward goals and careers. Understanding that values are at the core of individual differences opens a number of interesting research avenues, the most important of which concerns person-environment fit. Specifically, we like and are attracted to people, environments, and organizations that share our values. Likewise, we will become dissatisfied with and eventually leave people, environments, and organizations that do not share our values. Indeed, Schneider (1987) has always attributed his ASA model to his having read Holland. For the study of vocational interests then, values—not needs or interests—ought to be the starting point for vocational psychology.
Our second point about definitions involves an issue in the philosophy of science—namely, the explanation of social behavior. Harre and Secord (1973), Mischel (1968), and Peters (1958) all distinguish between “causes” and “reasons” as explanations for social behavior. Causes are biological processes inside people (hunger, fear, loneliness) that propel them into action. Causes are hard to study, and in any case they are more the province of physiology than psychology. In contrast, reasons refer to peoples’ intentions, goals, and agendas; these constructs provide the focus and direction for peoples’ actions, and they refer to psychological, not physiological processes. Peters (1958) points out that we normally use goals and intentions to explain everyday social behavior. Thus goals, intentions, and agendas are key concepts in the explanation of social behavior, and they are closely related to values, needs, and interests. Any competent theory of social action should begin with a clear view of what counts as an explanation, and vocational psychology explicitly deals with the reasons people do what they do. We will return to this point shortly when we discuss traits. For the moment let us note that values and interests are not traits; the terms refer to different psychological phenomena and serve very different linguistic functions.
We dwell on the point regarding the role of values and interests in the explanation of social behavior because, in the history of vocational psychology, researchers have paid little attention to a theory of interests. As a result, many writers regard the interest literature as conceptually barren, but we strongly disagree (cf. Hogan & Blake, 1996). According to Strong (1943), interests are “activities that are liked or disliked…remind me of tropisms. We go toward liked activities, go away from disliked activities” (p. 7). Note that Strong’s statement contains an implicit assumption about the motivational properties of interests; he regards them as having “directional’ properties: “Interest scores measure a complex of liked and disliked activities selected so as to differentiate members of an occupation form non-members. Such a complex is equivalent to a ‘condition which supplies stimulation for a particular type of behavior,’ i.e., toward or away from participation in the activities characteristic of a given occupation. Interest scores are consequently measures of drives” (p. 142). Once again, interests are motivational concepts that have a unique role to play in the explanation of social behavior, and they are the core of vocational psychology.
Vocational psychologists have always acknowledged that personality variables (e.g., the Big Five traits) and career interests are related, and every major figure in the field has suggested that interests are manifestations of more basic personality characteristics. For example, Darley and Hagenah (1955) described the assessment of vocational interests as “a special case in personality theory” where “interests reflect…in the world of work, the value systems, the needs, and the motivations of individuals” (p. 191). Similarly, Layton (1958) described interests as “one aspect of what is broadly considered as the motivation of an individual…a part of the person’s personality structure or organization” (pp. 3–4). Finally, Bordin (1943) defined interest inventory scores as measures of “self-concept” a point to which we will return shortly. John Holland states the point most directly: “If vocational interests are construed as an expression of personality then they represent the expression of personality in work, school subjects, hobbies, recreation activities, and references. In short, what we have called ‘vocational interests’ are simply another aspect of personality…If vocational interests are an expression of personality, then it follows that interest inventories are personality inventories” (1973, p. 7).
Given that vocational interests reflect personality and vice versa, the next question is, what is personality? In its most general form, personality theory concerns the nature of human nature. Nonetheless, following Mischel’s (1968) situationist critique of the field, psychologists seemed to lose the plot. The subject today remains as vexed and confused as it is important. Many people think personality is personality and further specification is unnecessary. In contrast, we believe there are three distinct views of personality and it is important to be clear which one you sign up for. Stripped down to their essentials, the three views can be summarized quickly (and unfairly) as follows.
The first view comes from clinical psychology. Clinical psychology is rooted in the medical model wherein the goal is to identify and treat ailments (Alessandri, Heiden, & Dunbar-Welter, 1995). Thus, from a clinical perspective, the most important generalization we can make about people is that they are all somewhat neurotic (i.e., have ailments). It follows that the most important problem in life is to overcome one’s neurosis, and that the goal of assessment is to identify the roots of one’s neurosis. There are two problems with this perspective: (1) not everyone is neurotic, so the theories only concern a subset of the population, and (2) measures of psychopathology predict career failure not career success. If all you know about someone is that he/she is not neurotic, you don’t know very much.
The second view is trait theory, as developed by Allport (1937), Cattell (1946), and Eysenck (1947). According to trait theory, the most important generalization we can make about people is that everyone has traits. It follows that the most important problem in life is to discover one’s traits—perhaps as part of a more general process of self-discovery—and the goal of assessment is to measure traits. Trait theory defines traits both as: (1) observed consistencies in peoples’ behavior, and as (2) hypothetical neuro-physiological structures that cause the observed consistencies, but which are postulated, not actually observed. So, for example, George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824) was a compulsive lecher because he had a hypothetical (neuro-physiological) trait for lechery. Unless and until the underlying neuro-physiological traits are identified, trait theory is tautological—because trait theory uses trait terms both to predict and to explain behavior. In the terms of our earlier discussion, trait theorists use traits as both causes and reasons. Put differently, prediction is not explanation; we use trait terms to predict behavior, but we use motivational terms to explain behavior. In our view, people don’t have traits, they have goals, intentions, and agendas, and it is these motivational terms that explain their behavior—which traits describe. Ultimately then, trait theory is intellectually incoherent—much as Mischel (1968) claimed.
The third view of personality is a combination of evolutionary psychology and sociological role theory (Mead, 1932) called socioanalytic theory (Hogan, 1982). According to this view, the most important generalization we can make about people is that they always live in groups and that every people-group has a status hierarchy. It follows that the most important problems in life concern gaining and retaining social acceptance and gaining and retaining status. In the modern world, careers are the vehicles for solving these two existential problems. Finally, in this theory, the goal of assessment is to predict individual differences in the ability to acquire social acceptance and status (i.e., individual differences in “getting along and getting ahead”).
From the perspective of socioanalytic theory, personality and vocational psychology are linked in the following way (Hogan & Blake, 1996). People are all alike in that they need friends, power, and social influence—that is, people are motivated to get along and get ahead. People differ in terms of their identities (which concern career goals and strategies for getting along and getting ahead) and their reputations (which reflect their success at these activities). Peoples’ Identities concern their hopes, dreams, and aspirations—largely the subject matter of vocational psychology. Peoples’ reputations concern how others evaluate their efforts to get along and get ahead, and reputations are captured by trait words—largely the subject matter of personality psychology. Reputations (trait words) tell us what people typically do; identities (needs, values, and interests) tell us why they do it. Personality assessment is about reputation; vocational assessment is about identity. Personality assessment is about prediction, vocational assessment is about explanation.
Vocational assessment concerns identifying and clarifying peoples’ goals—their identities. Personality assessment concerns how people typically behave, and are evaluated—their reputations—as they pursue their goals. People can usually describe their career goals—assuming they have some—pretty directly by means of reflection. But people tend not to understand how others see them; they need to rely on feedback from external observers to understand their reputations.
The dynamics of assessing vocational interests and personality are quite similar. People respond to items on vocational preference or personality inventories in ways that are identical to how they behave during other ordinary social interaction. In our view, they do not respond with self-reports. Self-report theory assumes that people read an item, compare the item’s content with a videotape stored in their memory, and then respond based on that comparison. But memories are not literal; memories are constructed based on the stories that we tell ourselves and others. In actuality, when people respond to items on inventories, they use their responses to tell other people how they, the respondent, would like to be regarded. In other words, when people respond to items on inventories, they provide self-presentations, not self-reports. There are important individual differences in how strategic, self-aware, and prudent these self-presentations tend to be; moreover, once again, what goes on in the context of responding to items on inventories is identical to what goes on in the context of responding to questions during any kind of interaction.
Vocational interest researchers have a more enlightened view of the meaning of test scores than personality researchers. Mainstream personality researchers (e.g., Cattell, Eysenck, Costa and McCrae) believe that the goal of personality assessment is to measure traits. This is problematic because, as noted above, people do not have traits, they have agendas. Observers ascribe traits to others as a way of making sense out of their behavior. Thus, there are no traits inside people to be assessed. An interesting transformation in the goals of assessment has taken place over the years: prediction has given way to measurement. Alfred Binet developed his original test to predict academic performance; Terman’s version of Binet’s test (the Stanford Binet) was intended to measure intelligence (Terman et al., 1916). The MMPI (Hathaway & McKinley, 1933) and the CPI (Gough, 1954) were designed to predict behavior; the NEO-PI is intended to measure traits. Thus the goals of assessment have migrated from predicting observable outcomes to measuring hypothetical entities. This critical difference has major implications for theory. In terms of validity, an instrument designed to measure something must be backed by a sensible theory for how the instrument measures the thing of interest. For example, (early) thermometers measured temperature on the basis of expansion of mercury in a tube. The validity of the thermometer is backed by known chemical and thermodynamic processes of mercury and heat. The assessment of psychological traits has no such corresponding theoretical basis (Borsboom, Mellenbergh, & van Heerden, 2004). One’s level of extraversion does not directly cause one to strongly agree with the item “I like to go to parties.” Some process must be involved, but we know very little about what makes respondents mark items the way that they do (though Funder’s [1995] Realistic Accuracy Model might be a reasonable place to start). Prediction, on the other hand, does not require an underlying theory of the instrument. Instead, it only requires that the instrument predict some outcome of interest. Predicting outcomes is a practical and empirical activity; measuring hypothetical entities is a metaphysical pursuit. We believe that the goal of personality assessment is to predict outcomes and in this way, the goals of vocational interest and personality assessment come into alignment (see also Yarkoni & Westfall, 2017).
Vocational interest and personality assessment differ in a way that is worth noting. The difference has to do with the content of the items on the two types of assessment. Hofstee (1990) notes that personality items are typically “a hodgepodge of descriptions of overt and covert reactions, trait attributions, wishes and interests, biographical facts, attitudes and beliefs, descriptions of others’ reactions to the subject, and more or less bizarre opinions (e.g., ‘Somebody is trying to poison me’)” (p. 79)—that is, personality items are an incoherent mess. In contrast, the content of interest items is much more focused: “(I)nterest items…involve preferences for behaviors (response and activity families), situations (the context in which the preferred behaviors occur, usually occupations or physical settings), and reinforcer systems (outcomes or reinforcers associated with the behavior in the situation)” (Rounds, 1995, p. 184).
Personality items lack thematic coherence, whereas interest items cluster meaningfully: they ask people about preferred activities, associated roles, and the types of people with whom they prefer to interact. In this way, interest measures get much closer to the actual content of peoples’ self-concepts and allow people to project directly the image with which they would like to be credited. They also allow people to describe themselves in ways that are more consistent with what actually goes on in social interactions between near strangers. Question: “Tell me about yourself.” Answer: “I like tennis” (as opposed to “Someone is trying to poison me”). People typically talk to others about themselves in terms of interests—interests are at the core of the ordinary language of social self-description and self-presentation. The conventional wisdom of applied psychology is that interests and values reflect affective responses to people and things. In contrast, we believe that interests reflect identities—when people tell us about their interests, they are telling us about how they hope we will regard them.
Most readers think the concept of validity has a straightforward definition, but they would be wrong: like many topics in the assessment business, there is little agreement on this subject. Trait theory (Cattell, Eysenck), for example, defines validity as the degree to which factor structures replicate across samples. Cronbach and Meehl (1955) define validity as an inference researchers make about test scores given their relationships with a variety of other test scores and performance indices. And then Strong (1943) noted that there is “no better criterion (i.e., index of validity) for a vocational interests test than that of satisfaction enduring over a period of time” (p. 385); thus, for Strong, the validity of a sales interest scale is defined by the degree to which people with high scores on that scale are satisfied working in sales. Historically, vocational researchers have defined validity in terms of the degree to which, for example, incumbent sales personnel have higher scores on measures of sales interests. Finally, Dawis and Lofquist (1984) distinguish between validity as the degree to which people with certain scores are satisfied with certain working environments, and validity as the degree to which employers are satisfied with employees with certain scores. It follows that dissatisfied employees will leave their jobs and dissatisfied employers will ask them to leave.
At stake here is a fundamental distinction between the actor’s and the observer’s perspective on the actor’s performance. This is the same as the distinction between identity (how people think about themselves) and reputation (how others think about them). Our point is that, in general, the study of identity (self-ratings) has yielded few useful results, whereas the study of reputation (observer ratings) has been quite productive. Using self-ratings of job satisfaction as a criterion is a case in point. A number of studies report no significant relationships between interests and job satisfaction (cf. Bartling & Hood, 1981; Dolliver, Irvin, & Bigley, 1972). Satisfaction matters to the employee; performance matters to the employer. A satisfied employee can still be incompetent. If the employer is satisfied, then there is hope for the employee; if the employer is unhappy with the employee, then the employee’s satisfaction is largely irrelevant. Our point is, research in vocational psychology should prioritize the employers’ (observers’) reaction to an employee’s (actor’s) performance. Strong was wrong—employee satisfaction is not a good index of validity.
Regarding the links between assessed interests and the degree to which employers see employees as satisfactory, there is bad news and good news. The bad news is that there is little systematic research on the topic—and that is good news for vocational interest researchers. There is, however, a kind of fugitive literature (as John Holland called it). In the process of determining by brute empirical means what does and does not predict job performance, researchers (e.g., Barge & Hough, 1988) have found correlations between interest measures and performance that compare favorably with the validity of personality measures (see Nye, Su, Rounds, & Drasgow, 2012). Further, a recent cohort study in Germany (N = 3,023) found that vocational interests predict life outcomes (e.g., work outcomes, relationship outcomes, health outcomes), assessed 10 years later, over and above IQ and Big Five personality traits (Stoll et al., 2017). These results are interesting, but there is little analysis regarding why interests predict job performance.
Campbell (1987) compared a sample of U.S. Army generals with a sample of civilian executives using the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory. As expected, the generals as a group received the highest scores on “military activities”; otherwise, however, the groups had rather similar scores. The similarity included very low scores for “artistic interests,” which is curious because artistic interests would seem irrelevant to management activities. Borgen (1986) suggests (and we agree) that the blind empiricism that typifies vocational interest research ignores many intriguing questions—for example, why is it important to dislike art in order to be a successful executive? Unpacking this question should be quite revealing, because artistic interests are associated with creativity, entrepreneurship, and interest in innovation—characteristics that should be valuable in organizational leadership.
Employability concerns being able to gain and maintain a job in a formal organization, or to get a new one should that become necessary. In the United Sates, official unemployment has been high since the 2001 economic downturn, and no one knows how many people have stopped looking for work and are not counted among the unemployed. Whatever the numbers might be, employability is a topic with major social policy implications. We also believe the topic of employability belongs to vocational psychology, the problem has immense practical significance, and, best of all for vocational psychology, there has been almost no research done on the subject. Employability is a target of opportunity for vocational psychology researchers.
In the remainder of this section we offer some observations to orient readers toward this interesting but unexplored research topic. Much of the discussion concerns distinctions, the first of which is that job performance and career success are not the same; they only correlate about .30 (Carmeli, Shalom, & Weisberg, 2007; Van Scotter, Motowidlo, & Cross, 2000). This fact reflects an unpleasant reality of organizational life. Organizations often don’t know who is doing a good job, but they always know whom they like. And people who are well liked in one administration may lose favor after a change in top leadership. This is compounded by the fact that performance appraisal systems—which directly control career success—are always imperfect. For example, Varma, DeNisi and Peters (1996), in a field study, found that performance appraisals are a function of how much supervisors like their employees and not the employees’ objective performance.
A second distinction concerns the fact that what academic psychologists believe are the characteristics of a desirable employee is quite different from what employers want to see in a new hire. Academic psychologists argue that the best employees will have good academic credentials and high scores on measures of cognitive ability and conscientiousness (Baruch & Bozionelos, 2011; McArdle, Waters, Briscoe, & Hall, 2007; Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). It is interesting to note that the same variables that predict academic performance (i.e., cognitive ability and conscientiousness) are those that psychologists believe predict career success. Although cognitive ability and conscientiousness are robust predictors of academic performance, academic performance is only modestly related to financial success (r = .21; Ng, Eby, Sorensen, & Feldman, 2005). Similarly, cognitive ability and conscientiousness nicely predict initial job performance, but the longer the employee’s tenure, the more personality predicts performance. As for what employers want to see in a new hire, they don’t care about educational attainment, and in some cases prefer candidates with lower GPAs (Chamorro-Premuzic & Furnham, 2010).
To answer the question of what employers look for in new hires, we must search what John Holland called the fugitive literature for an answer. We have identified three relevant papers. First, during the Reagan administration, the U.S. Department of Labor conducted a large-scale survey of what employers want and identified five broad competencies: (1) knowing how to find resources; (2) interpersonal skills; (3) being able to identify and use information; (4) being able to understand complex relationships; and (5) being able to work with technology. Items (1), (3), (4), and (5) seem to be a function of cognitive ability; item (2) is related to personality. Second, Hogan and Brinkmeyer (1994) conducted a detailed content analysis of newspaper want ads from all over the United States and found that the single most desired characteristic listed in the ads was interpersonal skill. Hogan, Lock, and Brinkmeyer (1997) then conducted a critical incidents study that revealed that the essence of interpersonal skill is “being rewarding to deal with,” which largely involves being considerate and well-mannered. Third, in the only study we know that deals explicitly with employability, Van der Heijde and Van der Heijden (2006), proposed that employability is a syndrome with five measurable components: (a) competence at the job; (b) ambition; (c) personal flexibility (e.g., being willing to move for work); (d) ability to work in collaborative groups; and (e) having work-life balance. A sample of 314 employees in a Dutch manufacturing firm completed their inventory of employability, and they found that: (a) competence predicted salary level; (b) ambition predicted salary and promotions; (c) personal flexibility predicted salary and promotions; and (d) ability to work collaboratively was the best predictor of every criterion in their study, including promotions (r = .32) and salary (r = .47). It seems, therefore, that employers don’t agree with I-O psychology’s emphasis on cognitive ability and education as determinants of career success. The limited literature that exists suggests that employability is a function of interpersonal sensitivity, social skill, and being rewarding to deal with.
Hiring decisions allegedly concern how well applicants fit the competency requirement of a job, and evaluations of job performance allegedly depend on (duh) job performance, but these views are not supported empirically. Boudreau, Boswell, and Judge (2001) report that ratings for “employability” during the hiring process predict compensation levels after people are on the job. This suggests that hiring managers and subsequent managers who conduct performance appraisals are responding to similar employee characteristics. Thus, the biases in the selection process overlaps with biases in job performance evaluations; that is, supervisors reward the same attributes that are valued in the employment interview, even if the attributes don’t enhance job performance. These conclusions are nicely supported by the Van der Heijde and Van der Heijden (2006) study: the essence of employability is socially desirable behavior during the hiring process and on the job. Historically, psychologists have regarded social desirability as a nuisance variable but we think it is valid and interpretable variance. Hogan and Shelton (1998) define socially desirable behavior as a particular kind of role performance that allows people to fit in and get along with others at work.
Hogan, Chamorro-Premuzic, and Kaiser (2013) reviewed the employability literature and concluded that the ability to gain and maintain employment depended on three competencies that they labeled Rewarding, Able, and Willing (RAW). Rewarding concerns interpersonal sensitivity and social skill; Able concerns quickly learning the job and showing good judgment; Willing concerns being dutiful and compliant. Employability is all about supervisors’ ratings. In general, supervisors like employees who are pleasant to deal with, who learn quickly and show good judgment, and who are obedient and conforming (which explains the consistent correlations between Conscientiousness and job performance). This set of characteristics also explain why some high-IQ people are unemployable. Unemployable people: (1) are irritable and argumentative, (2) show bad judgment, and (3) are stubborn and nonconforming.
The foregoing considerations suggest that vocational psychology could go beyond person-job fit and study employability in the round. Psychologists study the fit between individuals and the demands of jobs, but employers are concerned with the fit between individuals and their organizations. Focusing vocational research on employability will encourage research that helps the unemployed as well as providing an empirical base for public policy decisions. For example, presently most vocational research assumes that there is a right job for everyone (i.e., that everyone is employable). Although this assumption might make us all feel good about ourselves (i.e., everyone is great in their own way!), it is simply false. Employability, like all individual differences variables, is normally distributed. A vocational psychology that is focused on employability could do several things. First, it could help low employable people become aware of what makes them unemployable (e.g., irritable and argumentative). Second, it could design behavioral change interventions to help the unemployable become more employable. Third, a vocational psychology that recognizes individual differences in employability would recommend more entrepreneurial careers for those who are low in employability, assuming these individuals have other prerequisite characteristics for entrepreneurship (e.g., ambition, creativity). Finally, a vocational psychology that focuses on employability could identify the base rate of employability and use this information to develop public policies to provide appropriate assistance for such individuals.
Vocational psychology has traditionally studied the structure and the consequences of vocational interests. Our major claim in this chapter is that the true subject matter of vocational psychology is (or ought to be) careers, of which vocational interests form a crucial component and starting point. Knowing what career one would like to follow is, in the abstract, useful information, but in the absence of having a job, it is an empty exercise. We suggested in the preceding section that: (a) vocational psychology should attend to employability, and (b) employability is a wide open research area.
Employability concerns gaining and maintaining employment. In this section we briefly consider the next step in the evolution of careers—namely, career success. One index of success would be to be consistently employed, but that is the same as extended employability. What we are interested in here is high-level performance in any occupation. We think studying high-level performance in any occupation is an easy extension of the normal preoccupations of vocational psychology. It is also a topic on which there is not a great deal of informative research. We offer two thoughts as the beginning of an organizing framework for the study of career success. First, the one theme that characterizes the biographies of all highly successful people is they work longer and harder than less successful people—and John Holland would be an example. Holland called this the constant probability of success model: people who constantly turn out articles, paintings, poems, novels, inventions, or drawings are more likely to be successful in their fields than people who are less productive (Simonton, 2014).
Our second point concerns the psychological origins of the amazing level of productivity that characterizes high performers in any field. The answer, we believe, is individual differences in the desire to excel, to stand out, to be recognized as a superior performer—a syndrome that is captured by the term “ambition.” Despite the importance of this syndrome as the driver of high-level performance, the concept has an odd history in academic psychology. At the start of psychology as a formal discipline, Charles Darwin, William James, and William McDougall all argued, based on their ideas about human evolutionary history, that people are inherently competitive and motivated by “rivalrous impulses.” Rivalrous impulses are essentially the same as ambitious aspirations. What happened to this view that ambition is a core human motive? It just faded away.
Sigmund Freud powerfully stigmatized ambition by arguing that rivalrous impulses are manifestations of an unresolved Oedipal conflict and the unconscious desire to murder one’s father. Carl Jung argued that the goal of life is individuation and ambition is “a regressive restoration of the persona.” Ambitious people are stuck in an immature desire to have a successful career, as contrasted with fully coming to terms with the secrets of the collective unconscious. Alfred Adler characterized ambition as an unconscious and neurotic defense against feelings of unworthiness and inadequacy. Like Jung before him, Abraham Maslow thought that the goal of life is self-actualization and ambitious strivings are an immature distraction. Thus classic European depth psychology trivialized and stigmatized ambition (Jones, Sherman, & Hogan, 2017).
Today, the conventional wisdom of academic psychology is that ambition is a combination of extraversion and conscientiousness and ambition itself has totally disappeared. For example, the American Psychological Association Dictionary of psychological terms carries no entry for “ambition” (Jones et al., 2017). Extraversion concerns content-free social interaction. Extraverts are warm, sociable, impulsive, and talkative and do well in cold call sales. Conscientious people are diligent, dutiful, and conforming and they do well in accounting. The technical manual for the Hogan Personality Inventory (Hogan & Hogan, 2007) shows that persons with high scores for extraversion are described as sociable and energetic; persons with high scores for conscientiousness are described as not distractible and rule-abiding; persons with high scores for ambition are described as bold and assertive.
Career success and ambition have a place in the history of vocational psychology. The first author’s long-lost copy of the 1964 technical manual for the Strong Vocational Interest Blanks (SVIB), contained, in the appendix, descriptive data for an empirically keyed ambition scale. Strong compared samples of high-achieving individuals (Nobel Prize winners) with lower achieving people, and selected the items that distinguished the two groups. The manual only contained normative data, but our point is, E. K. Strong thought the subject was important and was working on it at the end of his career.
Vocational psychology studies career choice—one of the most important problems in each individual’s life. The discipline has a comprehensive taxonomy of career options, a well-developed measurement base, and a plethora of replicable findings to report. Nonetheless, it exists as an interesting subspecialty; it is not part of the mainstream of personality or Industrial/Organizational psychology. We suggest that the field could and should raise its profile by moving beyond the study of the structure and consequences of vocational interests by taking on two new (and underresearched) topics: (1) employability and (2) career success. The former is a problem with major public policy implications; the practical implications of career success research have yet to be demonstrated, but they are easy to imagine.
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