Journal of Vocational Behavior最新文献

One tool that has long been advocated to promote economic development and reduce poverty in developing countries such as Ghana is entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship, however, is a process that goes through several phases. One of the first hurdles for aspiring entrepreneurs to cross is to come up with a viable new venture idea. Drawing on the social cognitive theory of self-regulation, we hypothesize that the two dimensions of dispositional grit (consistency of interest and perseverance of effort) may enhance aspiring entrepreneurs' new venture ideation via entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Furthermore, the indirect effects of consistency of interest and perseverance of effort on venture ideation via entrepreneurial self-efficacy are proposed to be stronger when entrepreneur identity aspiration is high. Based on a sample of 265 (Study 1) and 338 (Study 2) aspiring entrepreneurs in Ghana, we found consistent and strong support for our hypothesized model. Theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed.

Career expectations of women and men have been documented extensively in both the career and the work-family literature, albeit very often focusing on women. This paper proposes to complement the existing work by shifting attention to men. Based on a French national survey and using multiple linear regression models with moderations, we examine the differential of career success expectations (CSE) — as measured by the perceived chances of promotion or wage increase — between men and women who face work-family conflict and use flexible work arrangements (teleworking and part-time work). We show that work-family conflict has a stronger negative influence on men's CSE than on women's, teleworking has a stronger positive influence on women's CSE than on men's, and part-time work has the same negative influence on both men's and women's CSE. This allows us to discuss the impact of the ideal worker norm on career success expectations and to show that a deviation from this norm has different effects on men's and women's career success expectations.

Building career decision self-efficacy (CDSE) and engaging in career exploratory behavior (CEB) have been identified as key adaptive career behaviors that promote successful career choice and development among adolescents and young adults. Using the RI-CLPM and a five-wave dataset gathered from first-year exploratory college students (N = 833), this study examined temporal predominance between CDSE and CEB and their effects in mediating the relations of personality traits to career decidedness. At the within-person level, the bidirectional model revealed a reciprocal relation from T2 CDSE to T5 CEB for the entire sample. A similar temporal pattern also emerged for European American students and female students, whereas the baseline model was retained for male students and students of color. At the between-person level, random intercepts of CDSE and CEB were found to mediate the relations of T1 extraversion and emotional stability to T5 career decidedness for the entire sample. While the mediating effect of CDSE was significant and tended to be larger than that of CEB across racial/ethnic and gender subgroupings, mediational pathways of personality traits → CEB → career decidedness varied by race/ethnicity. This study provides evidence for theory-based hypotheses regarding how CDSE and CEB relate to each other temporally within the student and how the two variables channel the effects of personality traits on career decidedness between students. It also offers practical implications for including CDSE and CEB in career interventions designed to facilitate career development of exploratory students of different racial/ethnic and gender backgrounds during their initial transition to college.

Boredom at work is perceived to result from lacking job stressors as opposed to exhaustion that is a response to excessive job stressors. Employee boredom and exhaustion have thus been considered as antithetical states, and yet they are found to be positively related. It is therefore unclear how boredom and exhaustion manifest among workers. We build on research literature on boredom and challenge - hindrance stressor framework to argue that some employees may be both bored and exhausted depending on distinct job stressors. We employed latent profile analysis and Latent Transition Analysis across two studies to uncover these employee groups and examine if their experiences change over time. In Study 1, we used data from 301 employees to identify four profiles that we labelled “neither bored nor exhausted”, “somewhat bored, somewhat exhausted”, “exhausted and somewhat bored” and “bored and exhausted”. In Study 2, where we used data from 2452 employees at two measurement points across 18 months, we replicated three of the four profiles. Challenge stressors were associated with exhaustion dominant profiles whereas hindrance stressors predicted membership in profiles characterized by both boredom and exhaustion. Profile membership was highly stable over the measurement period. Increases in challenge and hindrance stressors over the measurement period increased the likelihood of transitioning across profiles. This study extends literature on employee well-being by suggesting that boredom and exhaustion can occur in tandem. Further, we show that challenge and hindrance stressors can deteriorate well-being in different ways.

Flow is an optimal state that contributes positively to individual well-being and performance. Despite growing evidence of its antecedents and outcomes at work, few efforts have been made to systematically examine and synthesize the extant findings to advance the theoretical and empirical development of flow. Combining different perspectives (e.g., job demands and resources theory, proactivity and leadership literatures), we aim to identify the key antecedents and outcomes relevant to work-related flow, and (a) provide a nomological network and (b) spot areas for future research on flow. We conducted a meta-analysis to synthesize findings (N = 60,110, k = 113). Results showed that several factors, including job characteristics, individual characteristics, individual behaviors, and leadership characteristics were significantly related to flow. Individual behavior displayed the strongest association with flow (ρ = 0.55). In addition, flow was not only related to job outcomes but also to personal outcomes. We also investigated the relative contribution of sub-dimensions of flow to well-being and performance. The relationships between flow and its associates hold across different measures of flow and culture. Our findings suggest that employees can use more proactive strategies to foster flow rather than only respond to their environment. Despite the short-run side effects of flow (e.g., risk-taking behavior), flow is worth pursuing in the long run as it benefits both work and personal well-being. We encourage future flow studies to investigate additional social and situational factors and various types of proactive behaviors in a multilevel process.

Scholars made clear that daily job and home crafting can optimize employees' well-being, also when teleworking. Since telework is largely characterized by a constant juggle between work and home roles, we need knowledge on how teleworkers can combine job and home crafting during the day. While previous studies have almost exclusively applied an enrichment-based perspective, which assumes that daily job and home crafting can be combined unlimitedly, the current study proposes an effort-based perspective, which assumes that crafting requires effort and, therefore, can only be done within certain limits. Using a daily diary study (N = 839 days nested within 202 full-time teleworkers), we investigate whether daily approach job and home crafting can prevent daily energy depletion. Moreover, we predict that equally allocating efforts across daily approach job and home crafting is related to the lowest levels of energy depletion. Multilevel polynomial regression analyses showed that daily approach job and home crafting were negatively related to daily energy depletion. As an important exception to this general finding, the combination of high approach job and home crafting was related to higher energy depletion and should be avoided. Finally, our results indicated that, in general, allocating efforts to approach job crafting is more useful than allocating efforts to approach home crafting.

The journey from deciding to move abroad as a student to gaining the right to stay permanently has been described as a long tunnel. One of the most challenging turning points along this journey is when edu-immigrants (EduIms) attempt to secure permanent employment upon graduation from host country universities. In this qualitative study, we explore the career stories of 29 highly skilled EduIms who have undertaken the transition from student to permanent employee. Informed by the intelligent careers framework, we identify the career competencies our participants developed as they navigated this transition. Our findings suggest that one competency can be leveraged to develop other competencies, which build on each other over time. Also, we show how enacting intelligent careers required our participants to address the host country's macro-context constraints and facilitators that played significant roles in securing their permanent employment. Our findings inform practitioners interested in improving the career prospects of EduIms and in benefiting from a pool of highly qualified candidates.

The present study is designed to investigate how leader proactive personality and competency jointly relate to team proactivity. Drawing on social cognitive theory, we hypothesize that proactive yet incompetent leaders diminish the magnitude and enhance the dispersion of team role breadth efficacy, defined as the collective confidence to engage in a range of integrative, interpersonal, and proactive tasks, which lowers team proactive performance. The test of the hypotheses, based on two waves of surveys of members of 66 professional work teams and their leaders, reveals three main findings. First, leaders' proactive personality is negatively associated with the magnitude and positively related to the dispersion of team role breadth efficacy when their competency is low. Second, proactive personality is positively associated with the magnitude, but not the dispersion, of team role breadth efficacy if their competency is high. Third, the leader proactivity-competency interactive effect relates positively to team proactive performance, through the mediation of the optimal configuration of team role breadth efficacy (high magnitude + low dispersion). This study thus highlights the need to consider both proactive personality and competency for team management and their implications for leaders' own career success.

Existing research with gay dads has focused almost exclusively on those in the upper middle-class. Given the financial barriers to gay fatherhood and that parenting and work experiences often differ based on class, research at the work-family interface with working-class gay dads holds promise for advancing the field of vocational psychology. Using the Psychology of Working Theory (PWT) as a framework, the present study explored work and family experiences with working-class gay dads living on the West Coast of the United States. We collected and analyzed data using a narrative inquiry methodology, which involved a three-stage interview process, co-construction of narratives with participants, and generation of seven themes (e.g., Importance of Both Structural Economic Support and Structural LGBTQ+ Support, Many Valid Ways to Form Families). Situating these findings within the PWT model, we demonstrate how economic constraints and marginalization shaped these dads' experiences of decent paid (and unpaid) work, and how their adaptability and volition buffered these impacts and offered pathways to meaningful roles as workers and fathers. The stories of working-class gay dads and related themes counter the grand career narrative and provide helpful guidance for structural recommendations that attend to LGBTQ+ inclusion and more equitable access to decent work.

This study focused on the relationship of employees' career growth with high-performance work systems (HPWS), how and the conditions under which HPWS enhance organizational career growth. It considered job crafting as part of the mechanism, the idea being that employees actively exploit the resources provided and demands imposed by HPWS to craft their jobs. Using a multi-level, three-wave time-lagged design with 663 employees and 67 human resource managers from 67 companies, we found that (a) organization-level HPWS were positively related to individual employees' career growth; (b) task and relational job crafting mediated the relationship; (c) the organizational innovation climate moderated the relationship between organization-level HPWS and job crafting; and (d) the moderating effect had an impact on employees' career growth through job crafting. The implications of the study for the advancement of knowledge and practice are discussed.