Beatrice Van der Heijden

This interdisciplinary research explored how executives make decisions which shape their career trajectories and sustain their careers. We selected executives so that our sample would consist of decision-makers with sufficient capital resources to support a range of career choices. In our analysis we applied a recent framework of distributed interactive decision-making, which proposes that decisions are shared interactions between personal and contextual agents. We conducted 40 semi-structured interviews with executives who are MBA Alumni of a leading global business school to investigate how they made their career decisions. We conducted thematic analysis using NVivo qualitative analysis software to identify the decision-makers in each decision and their levels of agentic participation. Our results reveal that: (1) (a) executive career decision-making is distributed between the person and a range of active stakeholders in their career context, and (b) stakeholders along with influences together form a decision-making unit (DMU), whose composition changes according to the circumstances; (2) each member of the DMU may participate at a different level in each career decision, along an interactive continuum which ranges from proactive decision-making, driven by the individual, to reactive decision-making, driven by other decision-makers in the career context. These findings have implications for individuals, career counselors and human resource managers: we identify the DMU of various participants in career decisions and their level of active contribution to the decision outcomes, in order to develop sustainable career management strategies and processes. This is original interdisciplinary research, combining and applying recent theories of distributed decision-making for the first time in empirical research into sustainable careers.