The role of mentors in the construction of meaningful career narratives

Posted on: 24 October 2024 in Research

Through a qualitative study of former staff of the Eames Design Office, Dr Greg Fetzer examines how individuals integrate the role of mentors as they construct retrospective career narratives.

Mentors and employers play a powerful role in an individual’s early career, often leaving a lasting imprint. However, when that mentor or organisation is particularly well-known, employees can feel overshadowed as they seek their own personal career story.

Developed in collaboration with professors Spencer Harrison, from INSEAD, and Elizabeth Rouse, from Boston College, Greg's study focuses on ex-employees subjective interpretation of their careers.

Looking beyond objective career success, the research addressees how employees construct subjective success, in the face of tensions related to associating with a prominent mentor, whilst seeking a distinct creative career.

The analysis revealed employees build retrospective career accounts based on various sources of meaningfulness, which result in three types of narratives with a focus on belongingness, self-expression and achievement, respectively.

These narrative strategies place different levels of importance on the values and skills learned in the formative years at a firm, or via the influence of a one-to-one mentor.

The paradox of promise: association vs differentiation 

Starting points are critical to the unfolding of a person’s career narrative, but these are particularly salient when they occur with a prominent mentor or firm.

Working with a mentor can offer many benefits, such as skills, resources and values which can leave a lasting imprint on early career starters.

However, these promising first steps also present a puzzle when people try to make sense of their careers further on, as they must acknowledge association with a mentor, without being overshadowed by them.

Greg and colleagues refer to this tension as the paradox of promise, or the tricky task of recognising the influence of a prominent mentor, while still authoring a narrative that expresses career ownership and remains meaningful.

In order to understand how individuals navigate this dilemma, the team undertook a qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with 40 ex-employees, who worked at the influential Eames Design Office from 1957-1978.

Funded by Charles and Ray Eames, two of the most important 20th century American designers, the Eames Office offered a collective scenario in which mentorship came from a high-status firm, where young employees could develop skills and values, before leaving to forge their own careers.

Interviewees were asked about career progression, with an emphasis on the role Eames played in their formative years and on their future steps.

Narrating early career experiences: values-dominant vs skills-dominant imprints

Through an inductive analysis of their career narratives, the team first found Eames’ ex-employees interpreted their early experiences as imprints.

During particularly sensitive periods, such as an employee’s formative years, individuals are strongly influenced by external factors, including organisational culture, other individuals, etc.

These events leave imprints which shape how people respond to later environments, and often have an enduring impact on an employee’s behaviour and ways of thinking, including attitudes, ideology and values.

While all interviewees described how the Eames Office left a lasting impression on them, the imprints revealed two distinct emphases: values vs skills.

Values-dominant imprints highlighted how the Eames experience provided a “know why” in the form of significant values, which became anchoring beliefs for their career.

On the contrary, skills-dominant imprints emphasised the “know how” gained during their time at Eames, which included mastering design, creative techniques or collaboration skills.

Sources of career meaningfulness: embracing, contrasting or supplanting values

Building from the different imprints, the team found that individuals crafted their career stories by ‘reprinting’ (or reinterpreting) early professional experiences at Eames.

These reinterpretations revealed study participants found three distinctive sources of career meaningfulness via embracing, contrasting or supplanting the Eames values.

Through the process of reinterpreting imprints, the team identified three corresponding types of retrospective career narratives: belonginess (embracing values), self-expression (contrasting values) and achievement (supplanting values)

Individuals who embraced the Eames’ “know why” (values imprints) crafted ‘belongingness narratives’, which show a long-lasting impact of the company’s values on their interpretation of future career events and success.

In these cases, the original values become the lens through which later experiences are interpreted, with narratives that emphasise collaboration and contribution with others.

In contrast, an emphasis on skillsdominant imprints left empty space for discovering a “know-why”, with informants using the reprinting practices of contrasting and supplanting values, to explain how later experiences provided the dominant values within their career stories.

Due to the lack of values in their formative years, some individuals built narratives around a search for guiding principles through subsequent career experiences (eg new environments, projects, colleagues, etc).

The team categorised these retrospective interpretations as ‘self-expression narratives’, in which employees looked for values that contrasted, and allowed them to distance themselves from Eames.

These narratives focus on differentiation, as they explain how employees find their “self-generated” creativity, describing later career experiences as more significant, with an emphasis on authenticity and freedom.

In self-expression narratives, employees describe their journey to find personally fulfilling work that resonates with their values as worthwhile, even as these stories are often circumscribed by struggles for economic viability, which is viewed as trade-off for self-expression.

Finally, some employees highlighted the role of Eames’ values to stress how later career events introduced them to values they perceived as superior to those provided by the company.

These individuals crafted ‘achievement narratives’, where they acknowledge Eames’ values, but view these as a stepping stone to their own success.

While in self-expression narratives Eames is a backgrounded early experience, in achievement narratives Eames is something to be superseded by their own accomplishments, both as a predecessor and a foil.

By acknowledging the skills gained at Eames and differentiating themselves through subsequent success, individuals can drive a sense of meaningfulness, by claiming personal achievements and experience, and emphasising expertise and accomplishment.

By exploring how individuals derive meaning (or not) from their early experiences, the study expands the understanding of how employees interpret their career as a whole and make decisions moving forward.

The research also provides some ideas for how individuals can think about their own career story, and how others, particularly mentors, fit into that story.

Greg’s research contributes to interpretive perspectives of career success, mentor relationships and how meaningfulness is constructed, as well as addressing the larger question of how individuals may reconcile diverse career episodes, a fundamental concern of career theory.

Dr Greg Fetzer Lecturer in Work, Organisation and Management