“You can observe a lot by watching.”
Yogi Berra
What factors are most important to an individual’s career success and how do they contribute to it?
A fairly recent study tried to answer this question in an unusual way — by analyzing the speeches of baseball stars when they are inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame ((Cotton, R., Shen, Y., Livne-Tarandach, R. (2011). On Becoming Extraordinary: The Content and Structure of the Developmental Networks of Major League Baseball Hall of Famers. The Academy of Management, 54, 15-46)). The study’s findings are based on all available speeches, 62 in total, made by former Major League position players inducted into the Hall of Fame between 1956 and 2005. Some of the speeches quoted included Joe Morgan, Reggie Jackson, Stan Musial, Carl Yastrzemski, Dave Winfield, Hank Greenberg, Ernie Banks, Wade Boggs, George Kell, Robin Yount, Frank Robinson, Paul Molitor, and Mike Schmidt.
It is important to note that these researchers studied professionals that achieved extraordinary career success that largely required physical and not cognitive skills.
Hall of Famers’ words of appreciation were mostly for individuals who had provided psychological and social support as opposed to those who gave practical career assistance.
About 63% of all of the thanks from inductees in their speeches were for things like emotional support, inspiration, motivation, or friendship. Slightly more than one third (about 37%) were for coaching or other specific instructions on technical skills.
Families accounted for about two-thirds of that emotional support and the second largest type of contribution cited by the Hall of Famers was friendship (mostly other Major league teammates and then role modeling from others). The final category was coaching–mostly by Major league managers and coaches, rather than, players.
The authors make an interesting observation and suggestion that “Employers, for their part, benefit from evaluating workers not simply on the basis of performance but on their developmental networks — whom they relate to in the company and beyond and whom they might benefit from relating to. Performance appraisals, in other words, should focus not just on the what but on the who.”
Well, this study focused only on men so it is worth asking how much social support do women report and how satisfied are they with their sources of social support.
Gender and Emotional and Social Support
We took a look at some results from our stress and health risk assessment called StressScan by analyzing availability, utility and satisfaction of social support by gender. We tested gender differences by using a statistical test called Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and found some interesting differences in gender with a sample of almost 800 professional working men and women.
1. In general, women reported greater availability and use of their social support network (supervisor/boss, colleagues/co-workers, partner, family and friends) then their male counterparts (all p’s < .01).
2. Women reported using their boss or supervisor significantly more frequently than men. This is somewhat surprising as research suggests that successful women have indicated that mentoring is less important to their career advancement than did less successful women. Perhaps in our sample we have a mix of both “successful” and “unsuccessful” women or that using one’s boss is different from internal or external use of mentors for job and career success.
3. Women reported significantly more availability, use and satisfaction with their friends compared to males. They also reported greater availability and use of their partners, families and friends (all p’s < .01) which is consistent to what Shelly Taylor, Ph.D. has suggested is central to the female “tend and befriend†response to coping with work and life stress ((Taylor, 2006. Tend and Befriend: Biobehavioral Bases of Affiliation Under Stress. Current Directions in Psychological Science December 2006 vol. 15 no. 6 273-277)).
In our statistical analysis of social support for professional men and women we were able to determine the relative amount of dissatisfaction with specific sources of social support.
Men and women (N= 785) rated they were either “Not at All†or only “Slightly†satisfied with the following sources to meet their emotional and direct support needs. The support category that was rated as “most dissatisfied” was the manager or boss of the individual:
- Boss/Supervisor 31.0%
- Colleagues/Co-Workers 16.8%
- Family 13.0%
- Partners/Significant Others 9.9%
- Friends 8.3%
Men and women in our sample who reported higher overall social support also reported significantly:
- Lower Stress (correlation r = .35, p < .01)
- Greater Resilience/Hardiness (correlation r = .47, p < .01)
- Greater Happiness (correlation r = .58, p < .01)
Even if you are not research oriented it is important to note that the magnitude of these correlations are impressive ranging from moderate to moderately high which is not always found in social and organizational psychology research studies.
If you want to see how strong your own social support is, just contact me at ken@envisiaonline.com and we can make our research measure called StressScan available to you for free ((Nowack, K. (2013). Coaching for Stress: StressScan. Jonathan Passmore, Psychometrics in Coaching, Association for Coaching, UK, pp. 305-324)).
So, not only is psychological and social support important for our health it appears to be a pretty important key to career success.Â
How do you account for your own career/life success?….Be well…
Ken Nowack
Kenneth Nowack, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist (PSY13758) and President & Chief Research Officer/Co-Founder of Envisia Learning, is a member of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations. Ken also serves as the Associate Editor of Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research. His recent book Clueless: Coaching People Who Just Don’t Get It is available for free for a limited time by signing up for free blog updates (Learn more at our website)
