Journal of Vocational Behavior最新文献

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.

This study seeks to achieve a dynamic understanding of nursing students' engagement trajectories, of the predictive role of their levels of harmonious passion, obsessive passion, exposure to challenge and hindrance demands, and perceptions of institutional support in relation to their engagement trajectories. We also consider the implications of these trajectories for a variety of outcomes related to students' attitudes (i.e., dropout intentions and program satisfaction), psychological health (i.e., negative affect and life satisfaction), and behaviors (i.e., performance and absenteeism). A sample of 2515 first-year nursing students were surveyed five times, with intervals of one month, over a four-month period during the first semester of their program. Our results revealed four profiles of students presenting High and Stable, Moderate and Decreasing, Low and Decreasing, and Moderate and Stable engagement trajectories. Harmonious and obsessive passion, challenge and hindrance demands, and institutional support were associated with these trajectories in a way that mainly supported our expectations. Trajectories characterized by lower levels of engagement were associated with higher levels of negative affect and absenteeism, and with lower levels of performance, program satisfaction, and life satisfaction. Conversely, trajectories characterized by higher levels of engagement were associated with lower levels of dropout intentions and higher levels of performance.

Change is omnipresent in contemporary organizations. Employees' change support (i.e., the provision of time, energy, and contributions to a change process) is a crucial reaction for change to be successful, while employees' frustration (i.e., an intense negative feeling of deprivation) is a counterproductive reaction. Yet, research only recently began to consider work design as an environmental characteristic that can foster the development of new perspectives and thus be beneficial for employees' change support. We expand this research and draw from the work design growth model to argue that job autonomy and job complexity have more nuanced roles in predicting change support than accounted for in the traditional work design literature. Specifically, we propose that job complexity can be a facilitator of change support through its positive effect on employees' active exploration of new ideas (engaging pathway). However, it can also cause cognitive overload in employees, which leads to frustration (straining pathway). This ambivalent nature stands in contrast to job autonomy, which we expect to positively impact change support both via the engaging and straining pathways. Further considering the embeddedness of change in the social context, we explore the moderating role of high-quality contact with colleagues. Data from a 3-wave study with 643 employees supported the beneficial role of job autonomy and pointed to job complexity as a double-edged sword that facilitates change support but also leads to more frustration. High-quality contact strengthened the positive effect of job autonomy on active exploration, with positive downstream consequences for change support.