Distributed Decision-Making

Interviews with later-stage executives show that career sustainability decisions are distributed across a decision-making unit of stakeholders, and identify personal and contextual re-engagement strategies that the authors synthesize into a career sustainability matrix for older workers deciding whether and how to extend their careers.

Forty interviews with executive MBA alumni show that career decisions are distributed across a decision-making unit of stakeholders whose composition and level of agentic participation, from proactive to reactive, shifts with each career decision, extending distributed decision-making theory into sustainable careers research.

A conceptual analysis introducing the distributed interactive career decision-making framework (diCDM), in which sustainable careers develop through interaction between personal agency and meaning-seeking on one side and contextual resource demands and career scripts on the other, challenging individual-driven models of career development.