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Researchers widely agree upon the pivotal role of career self-management in vocational development. Yet, little is known about how core self-management constructs denoting agentic capacity affect each other reciprocally over time. We address the shortage of existing longitudinal change investigations by proposing and testing a reciprocal model in which career adaptability and occupational self-efficacy as core career self-management constructs are reciprocally interrelated. Cross-lagged panel analyses of three-wave data from a large and heterogeneous sample of employees indicate support for the presence of substantial reciprocal effects of career adaptability and occupational self-efficacy across time lags of three, six, and nine months. From a series of exploratory multigroup analyses, this pattern of results emerges as robust across a range of sociodemographic variables, including gender, age, education, leadership position, and organizational tenure. Moreover, the results remained stable after considering further controls (e.g., future temporal focus, grade point average). Our findings broaden the scope of dynamic vocational research by demonstrating the utility of a change-oriented approach in elucidating the emergence of individuals' career self-management. We discuss practical implications concerning career intervention strategies, study limitations, and prospects for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Networking is a viable career self-management strategy. Most studies so far in the networking domain have focused on long-term consequences and used a between-person trait approach. To address recent calls for more time-oriented approaches in career research, we extend the existing research by conducting a diary study over five consecutive working days (N = 59 employees). Specifically, we examined the within-person relationship between networking and career-related outcomes (i.e., task performance and career optimism). Further, adopting a motivational approach, we investigated whether need for affiliation moderates the daily networking career-related outcomes association. Our findings lend support to the moderating role of the need for affiliation in the relationship between daily networking and both daily task performance and daily career optimism. Our study connects motivation research with networking research by means of a dynamic approach that helps to understand the short-term effects of networking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research has so far established the multidimensional nature of networking behavior in Western but not Asian working populations. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to assess the cross-cultural measurement equivalence and predictive validity of an established multidimensional networking scale across a German and a Chinese sample of individuals employed by the same multinational company (total N = 248). Multigroup confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated configural and metric, but not scalar measurement invariance, indicating that cross-cultural comparisons of associations between the six theoretically anticipated networking dimensions and other constructs but not of mean scores of networking are meaningful. Path analytic findings showed that some but not all networking dimensions significantly predicted objective career success (i.e., salary and promotions, assessed 2 months later). Relative weight analyses indicated that all intraorganizational (i.e., building, maintaining, and using contacts), but no extraorganizational networking behaviors explained nontrivial variance in Chinese employees’ salary and promotions. In the German group, a largely opposite pattern was found. Interestingly, the relative importance of building and of using internal contacts was significantly greater in China than in Germany. We conclude that the functional but not necessarily the structural facet of a multidimensional conceptualization of networking behavior exhibits meaningful cross-cultural equivalence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To cope with a changing work world, organizations look for job applicants who rate high on career adaptability. The present study investigates whether leadership influences employees’ career adaptability. Specifically, we investigated whether inspirational motivation fosters career adaptability and whether employees’ future temporal focus mediates this impact. With a time lag of 3 months, 766 employees working in various branches answered two questionnaires. Inspirational motivation by their leaders predicted employee career adaptability, mediated by employee future temporal focus. Findings yield implications for personnel recruitment and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzed the influence of the occupational context on the conceptualization of career satisfaction measured by the career satisfaction scale (CSS). In a large sample of N = 729 highly educated professionals, a cross-occupational (i.e., physicians, economists, engineers, and teachers) measurement invariance analysis showed that the CSS was conceptualized according to occupational group membership, that is, 4 of the 5 items of the scale showed measurement noninvariance. More specifically, the relative importance, the response biases, and the reliabilities associated with different career satisfaction content domains measured by the CSS (i.e., achieved success, overall career goals, goals for advancement, goals for income, and goals for development of new skills) varied by occupational context. However, results of a comparison between manifest and latent mean differences between the occupational groups revealed that the observed measurement noninvariance did not affect the estimation of mean differences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study investigates expertise (i.e., high level of individual task performance) and self-efficacy as predictors of an individual's contribution to teamwork processes (problem analysis, goal specification) during team meetings. Multilevel, multisource data from a longitudinal field study in 22 professional software design teams reveal large within-team variability in individual contributions to teamwork processes. Expertise positively predicted a team member's contribution to meeting processes 1 year later, also when controlling for the initial level of contribution. Contrary to the hypothesis, self-efficacy was negatively related to problem analysis during team meetings [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]