Constellations and careers

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The effects of individuals' primary and multiple developmental relationships are examined in a longitudinal study of lawyers. In the past several years, the impact of interpersonal relationships on career outcomes has grown as a topic of academic interest. In particular, two major streams of research have tackled this subject -- the social network research and the mentoring research. In this paper, we argue that these streams of work have complementary short-comings that, when addressed together, can provide a much richer understanding as well as a new lens for examining how an individual's career developmental relationships can affect both immediate and long term measures of career success. Specifically we provide theoretical support and empirical evidence to argue that the structure and content of an individual's set or "portfolio" of career developmental relationships differentially affects different career outcomes. The empirical work is based upon a longitudinal survey of lawyers and their career developmental relationships and assesses the following measures of career success: work satisfaction and intentions to remain with a firm in the immediate term and likelihood of remaining with the firm and of attaining positional power, partner status, in the long term (eight years hence).