Structure and style in career decision making

Abstract

Almost from its inception Kelly's (1955) personal construct psychology has sustained a research literature directed at understanding vocational processes. This research has concentrated on the idiographic matrix of meanings, or constructs, that individuals bring to bear in making vocational decisions and wending their way through the world of work. Early work concentrated on adapting the theory's methods to eliciting personally meaningful vocational constructs, and using them in directed processes of exploration tailored to the individual's unique world view (Dolliver, 1966). Regarded as bi-polar bases of distinction among relevant aspects of experience, vocational constructs (e.g., outdoor work vs. desk job; high salary vs. low salary) provide a template or channel through which vocational events are viewed. These dimensions help organize and systematize the vocational events with which an individual is confronted, lending order and meaning to the world of work. Importantly, Kelly (1955) assumed that individuals differed not only in the particular content of the constructs that they brought to bear in making vocational judgments, but also in the overall organization, or structure of that matrix of meaning he referred to as the "vocational construct system" (p. 740).Considerable work has addressed the relationship between aspects of this vocational structure and a wide variety of career variables (see