Eriko Sakurai

The purpose of this research is to clarify the process of forming career support awareness in successful managers of large enterprises. Career support awareness is defined here as "A manager’s philosophy of how to capture strategies and measures about personnel training and career support, etc.." Semi-structured investigative interviews were conducted with ten Presidents and Representative Directors (aged between 40 and 60) of top enterprises listed in the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the interview results were analyzed utilizing the modified grounded theory approach (M-GTA). A hypothetic model of the above-mentioned process was constructed. As a result, 7 group categories, 23 categories, 61 concepts were created. It clarified that there are two career paths for forming career support awareness. The first path begins at "activity for work," and then progresses through "career development" and "psycho-social development," and culminates at "career support awareness." The other path is basically same as the first path, but it progresses through "maturation of one’s own philosophy for developing subordinates" along the path. It is expected that the content of this analysis will be applied to management and the personnel strategy for general enlightenment of managers, career support measures within the enterprise, and the selection and Ability Development, etc. for senior management candidates.