Journal of Vocational Behavior最新文献

Although work is increasingly globalized and mediated by technology, little research has accumulated on the role of culture in shaping individuals' preferences regarding the segmentation or integration of their work and family roles. This study examines the relationships between gender egalitarianism (the extent a culture has a fluid understanding of gender roles and promotes gender equality), gender, and boundary management preferences across 27 countries/territories. Based on a sample of 9362 employees, we found that the pattern of the relationship between gender egalitarianism and boundary management depends on the direction of segmentation preferences. Individuals from more gender egalitarian societies reported lower preferences to segment family-from-work (i.e., protect the work role from the family role); however, gender egalitarianism was not directly associated with preferences to segment work-from-family. Moreover, gender was associated with both boundary management directions such that women preferred to segment family-from-work and work-from-family more so than did men. As theorized, we found gender egalitarianism moderated the relationship between gender and segmentation preferences such that women's desire to protect family from work was stronger in lower (vs. higher) gender egalitarianism cultures. Contrary to expectations, women reported a greater preference to protect work from family than men regardless of gender egalitarianism. Implications for boundary management theory and the cross-national work-family literature are discussed.

Research on vocational interests has played an important role in understanding workforce gender disparities. However, current understanding about gender differences in interests is primarily limited to broad RIASEC interest categories that average together differences in narrower interest scales. This study took a refined approach to examine gender differences in 30 basic vocational interests (e.g., medical science, management, social science) using a very large and diverse U.S. sample (N = 1,283,110). Results revealed that gender differences in basic interests are more complex than what can be captured using broad interests alone. There was meaningful variability in the pattern of mean gender differences across basic interests, even those related to the same RIASEC category. Turning to the labor market, we found that gender differences in basic interests showed high convergence with men and women's employment rates in corresponding occupations (r = 0.66). Despite this convergence, there were also discrepancies such that women's actual employment fell short of interest-based predictions in many high-status occupations and in jobs that involve working with tools and machinery. In contrast, fewer men were employed in prosocial occupations than predicted based on their interests. Finally, we examined how gender differences in basic interests varied across intersecting age, ethnicity, and education subgroups. The most striking finding was that gender differences in interests were considerably larger at lower education levels, pointing to specific educational tracks where applied initiatives might have the greatest impact in improving gender representation in the workforce.

More and more employees aim to be perfect parents. However, it is largely unclear what implications this striving might have. Drawing on central theoretical principles of family-work research, we studied parenting perfectionism and its possible implications for employees' own and their intimate partners' family and work lives. In detail, we investigated how employees' parenting perfectionism relates to overprotection in their role as a parent and whether this overprotection, in turn, relates to employees' own family-work conflict (i.e., spillover) as well as to their partners' family-work conflict (i.e., crossover) via co-parenting conflicts. We also examined whether parenting perfectionism indirectly relates to employees' and partners' reduced well-being, family satisfaction, and weekly working hours over time. To test our hypotheses, we analyzed multi-wave (T1, T2 = one year later, T3 = two years later) survey data of 541 employed couples with parental obligation participating in The German Family Panel pairfam. Results from structural equation modeling showed that parenting perfectionism was indirectly related to employees' family-work conflict at T2 via overprotection at T1 and, ultimately, to their reduced well-being and family satisfaction at T3. Parenting perfectionism was also indirectly related to partners' family-work conflict at T2 via overprotection at T1 and co-parenting conflicts at T2. Our results highlight perfectionism's potential impact on oneself and others. Particularly, parenting perfectionism can permeate boundaries between family and work life and can affect both employees and their intimate partners. We discuss key theoretical insights of our findings for family-work and perfectionism research as well as implications for organizational practice.

In this study, we investigate the spillover-crossover effects of two types of work passion (i.e., harmonious and obsessive) for dual-earner couples. Integrating the job demands-resources theory and the spillover-crossover model, we propose that one partner's harmonious work passion indirectly predicts high work engagement and low work burnout for the other partner through positive affect crossover. Similarly, the partner's obsessive work passion indirectly contributes to low work engagement and high work burnout for the other partner through negative stress crossover. We also suggest that perspective taking of the partner strengthens the proposed positive transmissions and mitigates the negative transmissions. We tested the hypotheses by sampling 129 dual-earner couples in the United States at two time points. Results confirmed that one partner's harmonious work passion and obsessive work passion both had indirect effects on the other partner's work burnout and work engagement via the positive crossover of positive affect and the negative crossover of stress, respectively. Our findings also suggested that the partner's perspective taking significantly shaped the spillover-crossover process between harmonious work passion and the partner's work engagement and burnout. We discuss implications for research and practice as well as future research directions.

This study investigates how working remotely blurs the boundaries between work and non-work domains by contrasting the experiences of employees with different parental status. The study further shows how leaders can mitigate this blurring via family-supportive supervisor behaviours (FSSB), and extends the concept to encompass non-work roles beyond the family. Working from home leads to an increasing intertwining of work and non-work roles, with family status playing a significant role in shaping boundary challenges and support needs. Through semi-structured interviews with 89 employees working from home in various industries, the study reveals that parents and non-parents, distinct in their challenges and requirements, exhibit varied demonstrated needs from their leaders. As parent employees require flexible boundaries to attend to their family responsibilities, non-parent employees need safeguards to maintain boundaries around their private life. The results underscore that FSSB benefit employees regardless of parental status. This study emphasizes the importance of employers tailoring their work-life programs to accommodate the diverse needs of employees, and recognizes the pivotal role of supervisors in attuning their supportive behaviours to employees' work-nonwork boundary needs and preferences.

Although great strides have been made to better understand the workplace experiences of bisexual individuals, there is much to still be learned. In the present study we build theory around the role of inauthenticity for bisexual employees and the downstream implications for job attitudes. Further, we investigate the impact of the presence of other identifiable bisexual people in the workplace on shaping these attitudes. Utilizing a sample of 304 bisexual employees, results support that those with greater self-alienation, a negative aspect of authenticity, held greater intentions to leave the organization through reduced affective commitment. However, when the participant reported a visible bisexual coworker, this negative impact was reduced; the visibility of the coworker acting as a buffer of the negative consequences of inauthenticity. Counter to expectations, this buffer was not significant for those who had a visible bisexual leader. These findings, along with theoretical and practical implications, and future research directions are discussed.

Drawing upon person–environment fit theory and the importance of employees' career sustainability in Artificial Intelligence (AI) integration within organizations, we propose a moderated mediation model to test how and when AI trust is linked to employees' career sustainability. This mechanism posits employee–AI collaboration as a mediator and employees' protean career orientation as a moderator. Two studies were conducted to test the hypothesized model. In Study 1, a 5-item measure was developed to evaluate employee–AI collaboration and tested with a sample of employees working with AI technology. In Study 2, multisource and two-wave data were collected to analyze 447 employee–supervisor dyads. The results indicated that AI trust was positively related to employee-rated well-being and supervisor-rated employee productivity via employee–AI collaboration. In addition, the relationship between AI trust and employee–AI collaboration was stronger for employees with high protean career orientation. We concluded with a discussion of the theoretical contributions and practical implications.

Involuntary job loss poses at least two major, simultaneous challenges: coping with the psychological fallout of the loss as well as finding new work. Research on coping with unemployment has often emphasized the job search process, equating it with “problem-focused” coping. By contrast, while the psychological toll also represents a real problem for many unemployed persons, efforts to cope with the myriad non-search aspects of job loss (e.g., changes in social, temporal, and financial conditions) have often been considered as “emotion-focused,” “symptom-focused,” or “escape-oriented”, implying that such coping is somehow ancillary to, or even at odds with, the aims of re-employment. Extending the social cognitive model of career self-management (CSM; Lent & Brown, 2013) to the study of job loss, we examined psychological and job search coping strategies in conjunction with selected person and contextual factors that can aid or hinder the coping process. The project included development of a new coping strategies measure, the Coping with Unemployment Scales (CUES). A sample of 512 early to mid-career unemployed workers in the U.S. completed an online survey including measures of coping, social support, financial strain, proactive personality, and three criterion variables: emotional well-being, psychological distress, and job search progress. A structural path analysis of the CSM model yielded good fit to the data. The coping strategies contributed uniquely to the prediction of the emotional functioning and job search progress criteria. We consider the implications of the findings for future inquiry on job loss coping.

Graduate employability has attracted considerable attention, unsurprisingly so: The transition associated with graduation presents a series of strong events, that is likely to produce change in employability. We focus on perceived employability (i.e., the individual's appraisal of available employment opportunities). Change in perceived employability in the transition after graduation is sometimes hinted at, yet seldom tested: Positive change is expected, based on the idea that employability-enhancement in university broadens employment opportunities. While this may be true on average, there could be heterogeneity. In response, we tested heterogeneous change in perceived employability among university graduates using a longitudinal three-wave design and among three cohorts of graduates (N₂₀₁₆ = 581; N₂₀₁₇ = 547; N₂₀₂₀ = 339). The pattern of results is as follows. First, perceived employability on average increased after graduation, and in the same way in the three cohorts. Second, change is heterogeneous along three change profiles: one profile perceives themselves as highly employable at the start and becomes slightly more employable (49.6 %), a second profile starts at medium levels and also becomes more employable (38.1 %), and a third profile starts at lower levels and remains stable (12.3 %), with a widening gap with the other profiles over time. Third, profiles were similar across cohorts: Our findings are not sample-specific and thus robust. Fourth, the profiles are connected to labor market outcomes (employment status, job satisfaction, education-job fit). These findings are novel to the employability field in terms of unravelling heterogeneous dynamics, and its replication attests to the robustness of the findings.

Vocational interest research relies on interest taxonomies that partition the construct space of activity preferences into a small number of broad interest domains. To this day, the most widely used classification system is Holland's (1997) RIASEC taxonomy, which distinguishes between six overarching interest domains. A central feature of this model is that the six domains are connected via a circular similarity structure, the circumplex, which is often described with the help of two orthogonal core dimensions: People-Things and Data-Ideas. In recent years, alternative interest taxonomies have been proposed, which suggest different partitionings of the construct space that are said to better reflect today's world of work. Using the example of one such alternative, namely, the recently introduced SETPOINT model (Su et al., 2019), the current article argues that such taxonomies still strongly reflect the underlying core dimensions that define the interest circumplex. Using a mixed online sample from Germany (N = 560), it is shown that 1) the main and subdomains of the SETPOINT model reflect a circular similarity structure, 2) this circular similarity structure is conceptually identical to the ones identified in previous research, and 3) the discriminatory power of the SETPOINT scales for occupational group membership can largely be traced back to the core dimensions of the interest circumplex.