A study to identify career anchors in the National Iranian Oil Company: The application of a mixed-methods approach

The world is presently witnessing a shift in approach to organizational jobs and structures towards temporary and flat structures. Accordingly, people’s careers and how they are managed are changing in organizations. Understanding career anchors as a way to discover self-image and external feedback of behavior can be effective in personal and organizational decisions. This research is an attempt to understand career anchors among the employees of National Iranian Oil Company, which is one of the most important economic organizations in Iran, using a mixed-methods approach. In the qualitative phase, 30 interviews were subjected to content analysis, which resulted in identifying 14 categories. The four categories of career stability, halal income, God satisfaction, and dedication were not observed in the research literature. The reliability of the qualitative data was estimated at 0.853 by William Scott’s method. In the quantitative phase, a questionnaire, which was based on the standard CIO2 questionnaire of Schein (1990) and some self-designed questions for the newly identified anchors, was used for data collection from a sample of 200 people. The questionnaire’s reliability was estimated by Cronbach’s alpha. It was observed that career stability and halal income were the top-ranked career anchors of the studied employees.