Journal of Vocational Behavior最新文献

This research aims to address the research question of how knowledge hiding occurs from an ethical lens. Drawing on an integrated ethical decision-making model, we identified job content plateau as an important personally threatening situation that predicts knowledge hiding. We also proposed that attribution of blame—a specific mechanism of moral disengagement—explains how employees experiencing a high job content plateau bypass their moral self-regulation to engage in knowledge hiding. More specifically, employees can cognitively reconstruct themselves as faultless victims who are driven to hide their knowledge because they perceive: (a) their colleagues cannot be trusted; and (b) the knowledge-exchange process in the organization is exploitative. We tested this dual-path mediation model using time-lagged data collected from 301 working adults across three time points. The results supported the mediating roles of perceived distrust in colleagues and perceived exploitation in the organization's knowledge-exchange process, opening the door for future research to better understand knowledge hiding from a moral perspective.

Parents play essential roles in shaping adolescents' career development by engaging in a series of career-related parental behaviors. Based on three-wave longitudinal data collected with one-year interval between waves and using a person-centered approach, this study seeks to examine the stability and change in the configuration patterns of career-related parental behaviors, and their potential associations with adolescents' career adaptability among 1410 Chinese adolescents (M _age = 15.26, SD = 0.51, 52.4 % female). Four profiles of career-related parental behaviors were consistently identified across waves: Unsupportive but not Permissive, Supportive but not Intrusive, Rejecting and Neglecting, Ambivalent and Controlling. Further, results of Latent Transition Analyses indicated that there was a coexistence of stability and changes over time in the group memberships of career-related parental behaviors configuration patterns across high school years. Last, adolescent raised by parents who consistently endorsed supportive but not intrusive practices across high school years or at least at child 12th Grade displayed higher levels of career adaptability than adolescents whose parents adopted negative parental behaviors consistently across waves. Findings of this study highlighted the importance of systematically examining the heterogeneity and dynamics inherent within the configuration profiles of career-related parental behaviors and their unique implications for adolescent career development over time.

Asynchronous video interviews (AVIs) are becoming exponentially more common in the hiring landscape. Despite practical benefits to organizations, research demonstrates potential challenges for applicants, including lower performance in technology-mediated interviews, and a host of negative attitudinal reactions to AVIs. Given this, AVI companies often provide tips for applicants, and applicants often access online resources to improve their performance. To date, we know little about interventions that can mitigate negative applicant reactions and increase applicant performance in AVIs, or the mechanisms involved in such a process. In Study 1, 202 participants from Prolific were randomly assigned to one of the four conditions (in a 2 × 2 experimental design) and completed a 5-question mock AVI, to explore how an AVI training video and practice impacted a host of self-report behavioral (i.e., impression management; IM) and attitudinal (i.e., anxiety, attraction, fairness, usability) outcomes, as well as response length, structure of the response, and interview performance. Results indicated that practice had negligible effects. However, training was positively associated with fairness perceptions (particularly consistency) and interview performance. Moreover, mediation analyses indicated that trained interviewees provided more structured and longer responses, which led to higher performance. Study 2 offered a replication with a sample of 156 active job seekers (senior students and Prolific users). Training was associated with more structured responses, and through this, higher performance. Pre- vs. post-training comparisons for a sub-sample also showed performance improvements. Implications, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.

Decisions made within the family have long been recognised as a central obstacle to achieving gender equality, not only in the home, but also in the workplace due to the interdependent relationship between work and family domains. Here we focus particularly on how couple-level work-family decision-making processes influence (non)egalitarian work-family decisions. We draw on a qualitative diary study with 60 participants, comprising 30 heterosexual, dual-earner couples situated in the UK, to examine work-family decision-making in daily practice. Our findings suggest that egalitarian family identities, previously highlighted as important, are necessary but insufficient in enabling egalitarian work-family decisions. Instead, our findings highlight the important role played by the decision-making processes couples engage in, particularly in relation to their frequently habitual nature. Thus, we show how, while family identities held by men and women may be converging, habitual decision-making processes often continue to prevent egalitarian daily arrangements. We introduce the concept of ‘work-family habits’ and develop a novel framework depicting daily work-family decision making processes engaged in by dual-earner couples, revealing how each of these processes can contribute to either more traditional or egalitarian work-family practices.

Informal workplace learning (IWL) is the predominant form of vocational learning. In striving to foster IWL, the focus of previous research has been on work design: according to the active learning hypothesis, both job resources and job demands can lead to learning. Informal learning research has so far agreed with this assumption but has hardly investigated the direction of effects or explaining mechanisms. The alternative active shaper hypothesis suggests that engagement in learning leads to more job resources but can also create higher job demands. The underlying processes in both hypotheses may be related to proactive behavior such as job crafting. In this article we present the results of two longitudinal studies focusing on job control and workload. In study 1, we used a cross-lagged panel design with structural equation modeling to analyze two-wave data with a 1.5-year interval among 129 blue-collar workers. The results suggest that IWL leads to job control and workload; the reverse causal direction was not significant. Hence, study 1 provided support for the active shaper hypothesis. In study 2, we used three-wave data with a 4-week interval among 216 white-collar workers to examine potential mediating effects of job crafting in the relationship between IWL and work characteristics. The results supported the assumption that task crafting and relational crafting mediate between job control and IWL and vice versa, and that relational crafting mediates between IWL and job control. No mediating effects were found with respect to workload, and cognitive crafting did not function as a mediator either. In supplemental analyses, we found mostly evidence that informal learning and job crafting are distinct constructs. The findings partly contradict the predominant active learning hypothesis and have implications for workplace learning research and personnel development in organizations.

Although traditional research on human capital shows that it enhances employment success, its role in the job search process is unclear. To explain its weak effects in previous studies, this study draws on goal system theory to propose that human capital may act as a double-edged sword: On one hand it facilitates the ease of gaining employment, on the other hand it may compromise the frequency of job search behaviors. We conducted a bi-weekly repeated survey study on new labor market entrants and measured human capital using academic achievement scores. Results confirmed that human capital, though instrumental for proximal job search success, interferes with self-regulatory behaviors in job search. That is, human capital negatively predicted within-person job search intensity, and negatively moderated the within-person relationship between employment efficacy and job search intensity. On the positive side, human capital positively predicted within-person number of interview invitations. Overall, these results provide a more nuanced picture of the role of human capital in the job search process.

In adulthood, starting a new job is a major life event that, for many, accompanies significant changes to one's personal life (e.g., moving to a new location, setting up new childcare or eldercare arrangements, renegotiating schedules and nonwork responsibilities with a spouse or partner). Research shows that job candidates anticipate the degree of work-family support and conflict they might experience in a new role when deciding to accept or reject a job offer. Despite this, work examining associations between newcomer work-to-nonwork conflict (WNC), once arriving at a new job, and their adjustment to the new work role has lagged. To address this, the current study investigates the relationship between newcomers' work nonwork demands (i.e., WNC) and resources (having a family-supportive supervisor) during organizational entry, in relation to work withdrawal. Results from surveys administered to newcomers across three time points, indicate that newcomers' WNC was positively related to work withdrawal via reduced work-to-nonwork self-efficacy. Additionally, the indirect relationship between WNC and newcomer withdrawal was moderated by family-supportive supervisor behavior, indicating that managers can serve as resources with powerful potential to counteract the negative effects of conflict during this early stage. This study is among the first to explicitly link the work-nonwork and organizational socialization literatures. Our results suggest that organizations aiming to support and retain new workers may benefit from training supervisors to help newcomers manage WNC when starting a new job.

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.

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.