All career transitions create role ambiguities, risks, and exposures for employees that often result in perceptions of a loss of control and stress. Role ambiguities are characterized by uncertainty about one's responsibilities, peer relationships, mission, and career path. Risks that may need to be dealt with include financial exposures from salary reductions, financing the cost of a new house, cost-of-living increases, spouse's job loss, and loss of employment security.
During the career transition process the disruptions of established behaviors and the stress created by uncertainty interfere with the employee's job performance. However, as employees adapt to their new roles, increases in innovative contributions and personal growth will be realized. As used here, innovation is not limited to the discovery or introduction of technological or methods improvements.
Innovation includes all forms of organizational role development that is defined as job behaviors exhibited by the new role incumbent that were not engaged in by the previous role incumbent. Innovation therefore, can embrace behaviors as diverse as a new sales person's attention to a different set of clientele, a new computer programmer's redesign of system data files, and a new executive's reorganization of a department.
The ease of adjustment and the time required by employees to reach their full potential following a transition is related to the compatibility between the new job, career plans, skills, and expectations about the new job. The greater the compatibility, the less time required to achieve full performance potential. The new manager of an employee involved in a transition can strongly influence the adaptation process.
Feedback and rewards must be provided by the manager immediately following a job or career change. Given the manager's central role in the adaptation process, increased interpersonal contact between managers and their employees can help employees more effectively cope with their career transitions
In some cases, employees may be asked to make a career transition in order to support an organization's efforts to streamline its structure or to enhance productivity. Such transitions can be thought of as supporting organizational role development. Role development can be realized by filling a position with a person known for behaviors needed in the position that were not performed by previous incumbents. The conditions needed for role development are quite different from those needed for employee personal development.
Personal development is most likely to occur when individuals encounter new work experiences, are assigned specific job goals, and receive rich personal performance feedback. Organizational role development, on the other hand, is maximized when the individuals are not required to learn new skills, and are not dependent on high levels of performance feedback. In the case of role development, the transition issue is the shaping of the job, not how the job can shape the employee's personal qualifications.
