Exploring Career Anchors in Shared Service Centres

New ways of professional working associated with new organisational forms such as the shared service centre (SSC) are challenging the ways in which careers exist and are perceived by finance professionals. Schein’s original concept of career anchors has proved to be a helpful and robust framework for understanding career motivations over time, culture and context. Nonetheless, the theory is still largely based on career motivations and personal expectations prevailing in the 1970s and updated in 1990. Empirical testing of new anchors is rare and proposals for refreshing anchors tend to be conceptual. Using mixed methods this paper investigates the underlying constructs of career anchors for finance professionals in the contemporary SSC environment. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is used to explore a number of issues arising from interviews in a global multi-national organisation. The results suggest that a six-factor model, which blends traditional and new ideas about career motivations, can better represent career anchors in new organisational contexts than original theory.