This chapter is the introduction of this study, including research background, research purposes, research questions, definition of key terms, research delimitation and limitation.
Research Background
What organizations face now is a global competition and fast-changing environment.
Human recourses are seen as a dynamic element of organizations. As a result, organizations should have a flexible management team to response different kinds of challenges.
Management associate programs (MA programs) are used widely by organizations to groom their future leaders in advance in order to solve problems of unexpected talent shortage.
Before proceeding with the discussion oncareer development of management associates in banking sector in Taiwan, the researcher needs to define the meaning of management associates. Management associates (MAs) are regarded as high- potential individuals and organizations give them training to ensure they are ready to fill the management positions when the positions are open. Management associate programs, can also be called as fast-track, high-flyer, or high-potential development programs, have a series of development programs to help selected employees to develop their competencies quickly. This kind of programs has grown in popularity at Fortune 500 companies (Miller & Gentry, 2010). A number of firms have implemented management associate programs to meet the challenges of globalization, new technologies, competitive pressures and customer demands. By 2005, many banks in Taiwan, such as Fubon Financial, First Financial Holding, began to put management associate programs into practice (Chen, 2005).
There are 16 financial holdings in Taiwan now, which is quite a quite competitive environment. After crisis of financial, credit card and cash card, it is very difficult for financial holdings in Taiwan to have a good performance. As a result, Taiwan’s financial holdings began to notice the importance of talents. In order to sustain their competitive
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advantages, many domestic financial holdings imported MA programs from international banks. Citibank is the first one to implement this program in Taiwan financial industry, which have implemented it for over 30 years. Citibank develops a lot of outstanding entrepreneurs by MA program.
It seems that management associates have a very good future and have relative higher pay. However, Chen (2005) pointed out that there are many problems in implementing the MA program. First, the personnel flow rate is high. Because most of management associates are outstanding, other companies will poach these talents. Second, the turnover rate of MA is higher than that of general employees. A survey conducted by Cooperate Leadership Council (2011), a company provides authoritative data and tools, best practice research, and peer insight to senior executives, indicated that 25 % of high potentials plan to depart their organization within the next 12 months and 64% of high potentials are truly unhappy with their development activities.
However, organizations always invest heavily on these high potentials and have really high expectation on them. Retaining talented individuals becomes an important issue to organizations. As a result, it is necessary to explore what factors lead to these negative phenomenons. However, all researches only focused on the MA programs. Chen (2005) in his research suggested that future researcher can put emphasis on the career development of management associates. Hence, in order to fill this gap in our knowledge, this study investigated the career development of management associates.
Research Purposes
In the study, the researcher aims to analyze how management associates make job-related decisions. Because of the high personnel flow, the researcher wants to find out what factors resulted in it. For the turnover rate and feeling unhappy with their developmental programs, the researcher is going to explore what difficulties management associates
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encountered. In additions, the developmental programs are used to develop the skills and knowledge of management roles. As a result, the researcher has intention to find out what skills and knowledge of management associates were developed after taking part in the training programs and the effect of MA programs on their career is investigated. The purposes of this study are as below:
1. To explore factors affecting career choices of management associates.
2. To identify the effect of management associate programs on career development of management associates.
3. To investigate difficulties management associates meet in the workplace and strategies they used to overcome them.
Research Questions
To address the issues already outlined and to begin to fill the gaps in the previous research, the present study was designed to address the following research questions:
1. What factors affect career choices of management associates?
2. How do management associate programs affect career development of management associates?
3. What difficulties do management associates meet and how they overcome them?
Definition of Key Terms
This section provides the general key terms in this study, which are management associate programs, management associates, career, career development, and career choices.
Management associates are the subjects of this study, who are engaged in the management associate program and are considered as future leaders by the companies.
Organizations always invest heavily on them and expect their return.
Management associate programs are a series of activities and training that help
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management associates develop competencies which organizations requires in a period of time. The program always includes job rotation, special assignments, coaching and mentoring, and specific skills training.
Career is an evolving sequence of work activities and positions that individuals experience over times as well as the associated attitudes, knowledge and skills they develop through their life.
Career development is a lifelong and continuous of learning process which is not only work-related but also individuals can develops beliefs, values, skills, aptitudes, interests, personality characteristics and knowledge of work (Zunker, 2006).
Career choice means that one chooses one occupation from another. Individuals need to choose occupations when they have many career options and they prefer one job among these options (Agarwala, 2008).
Delimitations and Limitations
In Taiwan, there were a lot of organizations in different industries executing MA programs. However, the researcher only focused on management associates in banking sectors in Taiwan. All participants of the study should be recruited as management associates by banks in the beginning. In other words, MAs from in-service transfer were excluded. The seniority in organizations of subjects was at least 2 years. In the study, researcher focused on how management associate programs develop these skills, knowledge, attitude, and future development of high potentials. Furthermore, the factors affecting their career choices, difficulties in the workplace and adopted strategies were explored.
There were some limitations in this study. Due to willingness, the selection of participants was limited. First, most of interviewees were from domestic banks. The reason was it was difficult for the researcher to find MAs from international and government banks.
Second, all participants were first-line managers now because it was hard to find participants
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with longer seniority and higher position. Third, there were only 12 interviewees in the study.
The result couldn’t infer to all management associates. Fourth, due to privacy and organizational regulations, participants might not reveal the identity of reality. In addition, participants might forget the detail of the training programs and their feeling with time passing by. As a result, information the researcher obtained might incomplete. Finally, when the researcher analyzed data and did coding, it might involve subjective opinions, causing some bias.
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