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The expansion of the US economy during the 1950s and 1960s, combined with a relatively small baby boom, created unparalleled opportunities for upward movement in organisations. The 1990s, however, with a baby bust aftermath and adverse economic trends, are turning career opportunities upside down. Organisational growth has been slowed down, and many middle and upper management jobs have been eliminated. However the baby‐boomers are now looking for such positions, with meagre prospects, whilst the baby‐boomers of the 1960s and 1970s can scarcely match up to the demand for low‐level entrants to industry. To combat this uneven situation, the established concepts and cultures of careers must be totally revised. The alternative, linear, steady state, spiral and transitory career views are all examined and their interchangeability, where possible, is discussed. It is concluded that fundamental changes must be made in the ways in which careers are structured and managed in organisations, resulting in balancing productivity and morale against the distribution of money, power and prestige.

The purpose of the present paper is to offer a career concept and culture framework for measuring and managing the alignment between people, strategy and culture and especially the motivational capital as the fit between people's motives and the organization's reward and appraisal systems.

A survey of 312 respondents in a multinational manufacturing firm using two questionnaires about their individual career concepts, motives, and their views about the organizational strategy and culture.

The results suggest that the career‐ and culture‐based motivational capital is positively associated with how effective the people view the strategy, how well‐functioning the structure is experienced, how relevant the performance appraisal is considered, how satisfied the people feel, and how long they stay in the organization.

Future research should add more multi‐item‐dependent variables, use more translated questionnaires into the respondents' own languages, and study more organizations in different industries to make further use of the career concept and culture model's ability to capture the fit between different persons and their organizations and the importance of this alignment.

Career and organizational development can improve the fit between individual career concepts and motives as well as organizational career culture and thereby contribute in several ways to higher performance, such as greater motivation, more positive views of the organization, and higher retention.

The paper provides a unique approach to understand and manage the alignment of different persons, HR systems, and organizational culture with greater precision.

Mergers have become a fact of life for worldwide business. Some mergers have not been successful, either financially or in human costs. Some employees′ attitudes to mergers are described and some solutions to adapting and coping with mergers are presented.

This paper aims to test the pipeline model of leadership development by investigating how the competency profile change across position levels.

The skill and importance ratings in leadership competencies were compared between four position levels. The data were from an archive 360 degree feedback (n=770). Six SMEs were also employed to rate the importance of the competencies.

The study found that the difference between two positions in terms of the relative importance of the competencies increases as the organizational hierarchical distance between the two positions increases. Comparing the skill ratings yielded similar results. Further, the correlation between the skill and importance ratings for the same position level was higher than correlations of the two types of ratings for different position levels.

The study discusses the implications of the research findings in the context of leadership development and succession management.

One of the essential tasks in a succession system is to clearly define critical leadership skills at different levels of management. By defining the leadership pipeline, companies will be able to get their best people the right developmental experiences to help them transition from one position level to another.

The paper provides empirical support for the pipeline model of leadership skill requirement across the organizational hierarchy.

In their well-known contribution to the “varieties of capitalism” debate, Peter Hall and David Soskice (2001, Ch. 1) highlight the distinction between a “coordinated market economy” as exemplified by Germany and a “liberal market economy” as exemplified by the United States. Under the heading, “Liberal Market Economies: The American Case”, Hall and Soskice (2001, p. 27), argue:Liberal market economies can secure levels of overall economic performance as high as those of coordinated market economies, but they do so quite differently. In LMEs, firms rely more heavily on market relations to resolve the coordination problems that firms in CMEs address more often via forms of non-market coordination that entail collaboration and strategic interaction. In each of the major spheres of firm endeavor, competitive markets are more robust and there is less institutional support for non-market forms of coordination.