Some examples of such programs are detailed in a report by the Conference Board, a nonprofit, business research group (Shaeffer 1972). The companies themselves provided the descriptions, so these reports provide a picture of public self-presentations, not necessarily reality. While the four programs described in this report cannot be considered representative, the Conference Board selected them because the corporations they represent are leaders in human resources planning, and these programs were presented as positive models. Consequently, quite apart from their descriptive value, they are meant to have prescriptive value as ideal models.
Some similarities are evident across the programs described. All stress the importance of early identification of talent, the use of education for identifying talent, and the use of special "developmental experiences" to give these employees better training. Macy's department store reports that "college graduates are advanced more quickly than those with less education, and MBA's have been moved ahead even more rapidly than the college graduates . . . and have been given special assignments in the financial, operating, and administrative areas in addition to the experience that all managers get in merchandising" (p. 67).
Uniroyal's early identification program (EIP) is described as "the gateway to the promotional mainstream to top management within the company" (p. 76). It consists of giving special "developmental assignments" to exceptionally able young executives who have been nominated by their supervisors.
The initial management development program at AT&T selects a small number of highly able young employees to receive a series of challenging assignments which are conducive to managerial growth and development. This program was based on some earlier research at AT&T which suggested that young managers who had received more challenging jobs were more productive and attained higher levels (Berlew and Hall 1966; Bray, Campbell, and Grant 1974).
The First National City Bank of New York (Citibank) describes the most elaborate program. It is a program with four different career tracks. Track 1 is for professional and technical appointments (e.g., for filling jobs in computer programming, engineering, and law). Vroom reports an incident which reveals this quite dramatically. After completing a study of the promotion system of a large corporation using the official personnel records (Vroom and MacCrimmon 1968), Vroom heard a senior manager in the personnel department give a talk on career opportunities in the firm, a talk replete with Horatio Alger stories and vague assurances that this firm offered opportunities for all lower-level managers. Subsequent informal discussion revealed that most lower-management employees fully believed it.
The next day, Vroom presented the research findings which contradicted the general thrust of the personnel official's talk: Employees in finance and marketing had substantially greater advancement opportunities than employees in manufacturing, and employees in personnel had minimal advancement opportunities. The managers were surprised by these findings, and they were shocked when Vroom took individuals' career histories and plugged them into the model to predict likely advancement outcomes. Vroom and MacCrimmon's models, based on simple calculations of promotion probabilities for employees from different departments, came as a complete surprise to these lower-management employees, most of whom had been in the firm for several years.
In another study, Goldner (1970) asked 149 middle managers in a large manufacturing firm whether they expected to be promoted, and he returned 5 years later to see whether they had been. Although over 75% of the sample expected promotions, he found that only 51.8% of those expecting promotions had actually received a promotion in the intervening period. Goldner reports that 14.9% of those expecting pro-motions were given laterals, 20.2% were still in the same job, and 13.2% were actually demoted. Through detailed analyses of questionnaire responses, Goldner outlines a number of factors that seem to contribute to the misperceptions of these groups.
As part of the present study, I interviewed 163 employees in lower-management and foreman levels, and I found similar kinds of misperceptions. Many of the employees in this sample who had the lowest potential rating (a rating which indicates that an employee has virtually no chance for a promotion) totally misperceived their promotion chances. When asked what they thought their promotion chances would be over the next 6 years, nearly 40% of the employees with this rating (n = 68) said their chance of being promoted was better than 50%. Many of these employees did not know their promotion ratings, and the rest did not know how to infer their promotion chances from these ratings.
Kanter's (1977) study further supports these findings. She observed that managers had a "general lack of clarity" about tracks (p. 132). Even employees who were on the fast track learned about it only gradually in "strange and devious ways" (p. 133). They reported noticing the extra attention they were receiving, they began to infer that they were getting special treatment, and later they realized that they were advancing more quickly than their peers. However, "it was often denied by vice-presidents that officer material was judged so low down the ranks," and employees who learned they were on the fast track generally did not discuss it because they did not want competition (p. 133). Similarly, "awareness of being stuck came . . . indirectly" (p. 133), and those who realized they were stuck did not like to admit it to their peers. The lack of official information was accompanied by a lack of informal communication among peers.
Although workers' misperceptions are a classic and pervasive find-ing (e.g., Chinoy 1955), these findings result from studies of managers, including the people who run these systems on a daily basis. Their distortions could be interpreted as the result of intentional deception, particularly the public presentation by the high-level personnel official in the company Vroom and MacCrimmon studied. However, Vroom believes that this official genuinely believed what he was saying; for soon after learning these results, he was instrumental in getting the company to change these practices. Managers, even high-level personnel administrators, may not be aware of actual practices.
Of course, individuals' misperceptions about their own career chances are easily dismissed as self-interested distortions. However, these reports are not just matters of high aspirations; they also involve incorrect descriptions of reality. Vroom reports that managers did not perceive that promotion opportunity differed for employees in various departments. In my study, individuals' high expectations were associated with ignorance about promotion ratings and misperceptions about how to interpret them. These reports do not seem to be merely wishful thinking. They suggest that reality is difficult to perceive correctly.
The reasons for this are easy to understand. Just as organizations are reluctant to describe the full extent of their career structure, supervisors are reluctant to convey the full implications of a job move to a low-opportunity department or the full meaning of a low promotion rating. Indeed, my interviews suggested that many employees were not even aware that their supervisors had already evaluated their promotion prospects. Although company policy at ABCO mandated two evaluations every year and required that supervisors discuss their evaluations with their subordinates, many managers found ways to evade this embarrassing requirement. Hall and Lawler (1969) report similar misperceptions and ignorance about appraisals in a study of research and development (R&D) managers.
Although employees' perceptions are a relatively easy way to discover some of the structural aspects of career systems, the ambiguities in the descriptions provided by company policies make it difficult for employees to see these matters clearly. Ultimately, empirical analyses of actual career moves may be the only way to discover many aspects of career systems.
