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Cross-sectional data collected in a sample of 205 Italian workers (106 teachers and 99 public and private employees) who completed a self-administered paper questionnaire. The dataset includes observations of calling, work orientation, need for calling, origin of calling, occupational and organizational commitment, living a calling, work and life satisfaction, turnover intention, religiosity, spirituality, perceived organizational support, burnout, age, gender, seniority in their organization.

In this project, we provide supplementary materials to Vianello, Galliani, Dalla Rosa and Anselmi (under review), in which we present the results of a three-year longitudinal study that sheds new light on the origin of calling. We identified nine developmental trajectories that are typical across facets of calling, and found a reciprocal longitudinal relationships between having and living a calling. Furthermore, we observed that the initial level and the rate of change in calling predict participants’ mean grade, satisfaction, and dropout intentions at Time 3.

There are many open questions concerning the development of calling, and longitudinal empirical evidence is limited. We know that a calling is associated with many beneficial outcomes, but we do not know how it changes through time and what predicts these changes. Previous studies have shown that calling is relatively stable at the sample level. We show that, at the individual level, calling shows huge variations through time. We identified nine developmental trajectories that are typical across facets of calling, and we found evidence that the development of a calling is fostered by the extent to which individuals have lived it out. We also observed that the more a calling has grown over a 2-year period, the more it is lived out during the third year. These results provide support for a developmental model of calling according to which having a calling and living it out reciprocally influence each other. The practical and theoretical implications of these results are discussed.

This project investigates occupational calling in college students by means of a longitudinal design involving 4 waves of data collection.