“我想要新的挑战”

6月 7, 2010

不久之前很多员工还希望能够跟随自己父辈甚至祖父辈的脚步，拥有一份终身工作。但对当今很多相对富裕的社会来说，情况则完全不同了。更长的受教育时间，更好的个人选择与公司的兼并、收购以及破产的互相作用意味着人们的职业生涯往往会被一系列重大的转变所打断。但是拥有不同文化的人们如何去感知并且理解这些转变呢？Katharina Chudzikowski和她的同事们采访了来自奥地利、塞尔维亚、西班牙、美国和中国五个国家的包括护士、蓝领和白领阶层在内的超过一百名员工去寻找答案。

“I wanted a new challenge”
- Cross-cultural differences in workers’ thoughts about their career changes
“我想要新的挑战”
-员工关于职业变更的想法的跨文化差异
译者：弈昕 提交日期：2010年5月28日

It’s not many generations ago that workers expected to have a job for life, most probably one that followed in the footsteps of their father, and his father before that. In many of today’s richer societies, it’s all different. Longer education and greater individual choice mixed with mergers, take-overs and bankruptcies mean that people’s careers are typically punctuated by a series of distinct transitions or chapters. But how do people perceive these transitions and do such perceptions vary between cultures? To find out, Katharina Chudzikowski and her colleagues interviewed a mix of over a hundred nurses and blue- and white-collar workers from five countries - Austria, Serbia, Spain, USA and China.

不久之前很多员工还希望能够跟随自己父辈甚至祖父辈的脚步，拥有一份终身工作。但对当今很多相对富裕的社会来说，情况则完全不同了。更长的受教育时间，更好的个人选择与公司的兼并、收购以及破产的互相作用意味着人们的职业生涯往往会被一系列重大的转变所打断。但是拥有不同文化的人们如何去感知并且理解这些转变呢？Katharina Chudzikowski和她的同事们采访了来自奥地利、塞尔维亚、西班牙、美国和中国五个国家的包括护士、蓝领和白领阶层在内的超过一百名员工去寻找答案。

Their stand-out finding? Workers in the United States didn’t ever attribute a career transition to an external cause, such as conflict with a boss. Not once. Instead they tended to mention internal factors, such as their desire for a fresh challenge. By contrast, workers in China almost exclusively stressed the role played by external factors. Meanwhile, workers in the the European nations were more of a mix, attributing their career transitions to both internal and external factors.

他们突出的发现是什么呢？美国的员工从不会将职业的转变归结于外部因素，比如与老板的冲突。一个也没有。相对的，他们倾向于提出内部因素，比如他们对新挑战的渴求。相比之下，中国的员工大多专门强调外因起到的作用。而欧洲国家的员工更倾向于同时归因于内部和外部因素。

The researchers said a lot of the transitions reported by the participants, especially in the USA and Europe, were positive. Generally-speaking, people are known to be biased towards attributing positive events to themselves, and so it’s perhaps little wonder that many workers attributed all these positive career transitions to internal causes. “In addition,” the researchers said, “in many cultures ‘being in charge’ of one’s life is positively valued. Conversely, reconstructing crucial career transitions as purely triggered by external circumstances does not convey a great amount of competence.”

研究者说，被采访者，尤其是来自美国和欧洲国家的，所述的许多转变是积极的。一般而言，人们会偏向于将积极的事件归因于自身，所以我们可能对员工将所有积极的职业生涯转变归因于内部原因这点并不感到奇怪。研究者补充道：另外，在许多文化中，‘负责’自己的人生是非常重要的。相反的，将职业生涯转变纯粹归结于外部条件的触发是能力缺乏的表现。

Where workers showed a greater tendency to attribute their career transitions to external causes, this seemed to be related to the influence of a collectivist culture and an economy in flux. “Countries with more dynamic economic change show a stronger emphasis on organisational and macro factors,” the researchers said.

员工更倾向于将他们的职业生涯转变归因于外部原因的表现，可能与集体主义文化和不稳定的经济状况的影响相关。研究者说：“经济状况不断变化的国家更加强调组织和宏观因素。”

Apart from the value of its findings, the study also provides a useful demonstration of the difficulties involved in conducting cross-cultural research. For example, whilst interviews were conducted in the participants’ native languages, the transcripts were translated into English for qualitative analysis, which raised some interesting problems. For example, some German-speaking interviewees cited “Wirtschaft” as an influencing factor - a word that can mean economy, industry, commerce or business world, but which also has mythical-religious undertones. There’s no real direct equivalent in English.

此研究不仅得到了很有价值的发现，也帮助我们看到了在进行跨文化研究时会遇到的困难。比如说，采访使用的是被访者的母语，采访记录在被翻译成英文用于定性分析是会出现一些有趣的问题。比如，一些说德语的被访者引用“Wirtschaft”作为一个影响因素。Wirtschaft的意思有经济、工业、商业、工商界，但是也有潜在的宗教涵义，但英语中没有与之直接对应的词汇。

参考文献：
Chudzikowski, K., Demel, B., Mayrhofer, W., Briscoe, J., Unite, J., Bogićević Milikić, B., Hall, D., Las Heras, M., Shen, Y., & Zikic, J. (2009).
Career transitions and their causes: A country-comparative perspective Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 82 (4), 825-849
DOI: 10.1348/096317909X474786
原文来源：http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2009/12/i-wanted-new-challenge-cross-cultural.html

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