Career Plateau

Since Thomas Ference, James Stoner, and Kirby Warren's seminal work first defined the career plateau, researchers have continued to investigate this [Page 134]antithetical phenomenon. This is due to the fact that many employees consider promotions and upward hierarchical movement as synonymous indicators of success at work. The career plateau phenomenon involves situations within which an employee perceives a low likelihood of increased responsibility.

There are two types of career plateaus: structural and content. In structural plateauing, the individual becomes unable to rise further in the flattened organization's pyramid structure and reaches a point where the likelihood of additional hierarchical promotion is very low. Structurally plateaued employees who equate career success with hierarchical movement may become distressed upon acknowledging their plateaus with their current employers. These employees may take action to remove themselves from the situation, withdraw from organizational involvement, and lower their productivity. All of these scenarios provide a rationale for explaining why career plateauing often has a negative connotation.

Judith Bardwick suggested that employees also plateau when their likelihood of increased growth or challenges associated with the current job is low. When increasing job-specific task responsibility that offers developmental opportunities becomes unattainable, an employee is said to experience a content plateau. Content-plateaued employees may already be proficient in their jobs, expect no further challenges to be associated with the job, and feel stifled regarding the job's content. Content-plateaued employees are no longer intrigued by their work and often feel they have reached a dead end. Many researchers have empirically confirmed the existence of both of these plateau types.

Over the years, career plateauing has been subject to a variety of conceptual interpretations and empirical measurements. Career plateauing has been objectively measured and defined as either age or long job tenure when comparing the plateaued employee with the average workforce member. Objective measures fail researchers in two respects. First, chronological age and length of tenure will vary from industry to industry, and these measures fail to capture the notion of a stalled career. When is one stalled? How can age or tenure be a proxy when individuals often move from company to company or through myriad industries and restart careers at a senior age? Second, objective measures fail to capture one's personal perception of being plateaued. Plateauing seems to run along a continuum where some individuals perceive being plateaued quickly, while it takes others longer job tenures to feel plateaued. Therefore, the exact time (or age) when someone plateaus varies greatly.

Plateauing has also been measured subjectively as the perception of the individual (or his/her employer) regarding one's likelihood of increased responsibility. Many have found that the perceptual measure better informs us regarding work attitudes and behaviors than does the objectively measured construct. Some have suggested that there may be different degrees of “plateauedness” and therefore that the career plateau construct should be measured on a continuous scale. While self-reported measures may cause some measurement bias, in the case of career plateauing it appears that perceptual measures truly capture one's career situation.