A study of career orientations, career styles, and rewarded activity as perceived by selected public school business officials in Texas

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to identify career perceptions of Texas school business officials in terms of variables relating to career identification and style and to rewarded activity, and to determine the existence and strength of relationships both among those career variables and between the career variables and thirteen demographic variables. This study was conducted during the 1979-1980 school year among a sample of 931 incumbents who were stratified according to nine position areas. The sample was drawn from a population composed of all school business officials employed by public school districts in Texas as identified in the 1978-1979 Texas School Directory and the 1979 TASBO membership roster. 437 officials returned the questionnaires with 431 usable responses. Data obtained was arrayed in contingency tables and analyzed by the chi-square statistic and its related contingency coefficient (C) as provided by SPSS subprogram CROSSTABS. The typical responding school business official was oriented to his district first, a profession second, and administration third; was active, mobile, idealistic in a career style emphasizing both task skills and interpersonal relations; and perceived personality first, competence a close second, visibility third, and circumstance a distant fourth as rewarded activities. The following bivariate relationships were found to be significant among the career variables; institutional with administrative identification, institutional orientation with the non-movement and the idealistic career styles, institutional orientation with competence and personality as rewarded activities, professional identification with a style of task accomplishment, administrative orientation with an active style and with acceptance of visibility as rewarded activity, a mobile career style with an active one and with a style stressing both task accomplishment and interpersonal relations, a non-movement style with competence as rewarded activity, a passive style with a cynical one, both the active and the idealistic styles with competence and personality as rewarded activities, a cynical style with circumstance as rewarded activity, and, among the perceived rewarded activities, competence with personality, personality with visibility and with circumstance, and, negatively, competence with circumstance...