When productivity prevails: governing trade-offs in women managers' career sustainability

The sustainable careers framework conceptualizes career sustainability as the ongoing maintenance of productivity, health, and happiness over time. Yet in high-intensity managerial roles characterized by sustained performance demands, work intensity and evolving relational responsibilities, maintaining these indicators simultaneously may be difficult to achieve. This qualitative study, situated within an interpretivist epistemology and a constructionist ontology, examines how women managers sustain their careers under such conditions. Drawing on in-depth narrative accounts of 43 women managers in a large organization, we explore how career sustainability is enacted over time under conditions of bounded and relational agency. Our analysis identifies five configurations through which women govern sustainability trade-offs across their careers: Productivity-driven focus, Adaptation through regulation, Endurance under constraint, Externally regulated optimization, and Relationally enabled sustainability. These configurations illustrate how women dynamically adjust the prioritization of their productivity, health, and happiness amid changing work demands, relational arrangements, and life course circumstances. Overall, productivity remained the dominant organizing principle of career engagement, while health and happiness were variously prioritized, deferred, or renegotiated across career phases. We therefore show that career sustainability in high-intensity managerial contexts is enacted not through the balanced maintenance of productivity, health, and happiness, but through the ongoing governance of trade-offs among these indicators under conditions of bounded and relational agency. By bringing an interactionist perspective to the sustainable careers framework, this study advances understanding of how sustainable careers unfold through the situated recalibration of competing demands over time, and the role personal agency and contextual factors play in this regard.