Journal of Vocational Behavior最新文献

Despite workplace anxiety being a common experience of daily work life that is increasingly reliant on technology, we lack knowledge of technology-based job demands that prompt its occurrence. Drawing on theorization on workplace anxiety and integrating literature on information and communication technologies, we consider telepressure and normative response pressure as internal and external between-person sources of daily workplace anxiety. We further present a model of how employees adaptively (vs. maladaptively) respond to workplace anxiety on days they experience workplace anxiety, where anxiety prompts: (a) work e-mail activity, a self-regulatory behavior facilitating performance outcomes; and (b) non-work e-mail activity, a behavior that disengages employees from their work, debilitating performance outcomes. Utilizing a multilevel, time-lagged experience sampling field study across 10 workdays (Level 1 N = 809; Level 2 N = 96), we identify telepressure as a significant contributor of daily workplace anxiety. Further, we found support for an adaptive function of workplace anxiety. On days employees experienced workplace anxiety, their personal initiative and citizenship behaviors were enhanced through behavioral regulatory activity manifested in work e-mail activity. This indirect effect was strengthened for employees perceiving higher (vs. lower) work e-mail centrality. This research advances understanding of the adaptive function of workplace anxiety, such that employees are active drivers of their daily experiences of workplace anxiety.

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.

With organizations increasingly requiring employees to proactively manage their job and career, researchers have examined various proactive behaviors, such as feedback-seeking behavior and personal initiative. However, few studies have explored the relationships and dynamics among these behaviors. Based on sensemaking theory, this paper argues that employees' feedback-seeking behavior is positively associated with their performance through two stages: meaningfulness and personal initiative. Our hypotheses were tested and supported using two samples: 196 supervisor-subordinate dyads from one large organization in China (Study 1) and panel data of 207 full-time employees from the UK (Study 2). Our findings highlight the importance of recognizing the distinctiveness of different forms of proactive behavior and the synergistic way they contribute to performance. We also demonstrate that employees can seek feedback and construct meaningful work experiences in an agentic manner, which contributes to the literature on career crafting and career self-management.

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.