Career customization: Putting an organizational practice to facilitate sustainable careers to the test

Work-life balance and the psychosocial work environment in Finnish working life: The case of gender and family life stages

BACKGROUND

Work-life balance is associated with many positive effects at multiple levels and demands increased research attention. In the international literature on work-life balance, the term "gendered life-course" has been used to describe the differences between men and women in work biographies. However, whether this term applies to the Nordic work context remains underexplored.

OBJECTIVE

This study examined Finnish men's and women's subjective experience of the association between work-life balance and the psychosocial work environment (work demands and social support at work) across the life course, devoting special attention to family life stages encompassing the care of (young) children.

METHODS

Data from the Quality of Work Life Survey 2018 were utilized to conduct binary logistic regression analyses (N = 3790). Separate analyses were conducted for men and women.

RESULTS

A significant association between family life stage and high work-life balance was found for women but not for men in the Finnish working life. Women in family life stages involving the care of young, dependent children reported the lowest odds of high work-life balance. For both men and women, a positive association between social support at work and high work-life balance was found, while a negative association was found between work demands and high work-life balance.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings highlight the importance of psychosocial factors in both the work and family settings for work-life balance. Further, the findings call for an expanded focus on gender equality, also including issues in unpaid work in addition to issues in paid work.

Understanding registered nurses' career choices in home care services: a qualitative study

BACKGROUND

The anticipated growth in number of older people with long-term health problems is associated with a greater need for registered nurses. Home care services needs enough nurses that can deliver high quality services in patients' homes. This article improves our understanding of nurses' career choices in home care services.

METHODS

A qualitative study using individual semi-structured interviews with 20 registered nurses working in home care services. The interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed and thematically analyzed.

RESULTS

The analysis resulted in three themes emphasizing the importance of multiple stakeholders and contextual factors, fit with nurses' private life, and meaning of work. The results offer important insights that can be used to improve organizational policy and HR practices to sustain a workforce of registered nurses in home care services.

CONCLUSION

The results illustrate the importance of having a whole life perspective to understand nurses' career choices, and how nurses' career preferences changes over time.

How do individual factors affect career sustainability? An investigation of cascading effects through the career construction model of adaptation

Purpose

Though the recent conceptualization of career sustainability, defining its indicators and dimensions prompted an important field of careers research, empirical research is still in its infancy. The current study empirically investigates how proactive personality, career adaptability and proactive career behaviors promote career sustainability based on the career construction model of adaptation.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors used a two-wave survey design to collect data from 414 full-time working professionals representing different organizations located in India. The authors tested the proposed hypotheses using structural equation modeling in IBM SPSS AMOS.

Findings

Results supported a serial indirect effect model with career adaptability and proactive career behaviors carrying the effect of proactive personality on career sustainability.

Originality/value

The study contributes to the emerging sustainable careers literature by unveiling the role of individual factors in career sustainability. Furthermore, the authors investigated these relationships through the complete career construction model of adaptation. By doing so, the current study contributes to careers literature by revealing the linkage between the career construction model of adaptation and career sustainability.

Crafting Project Managers’ Careers: Integrating the Fields of Careers and Project Management

Project managers experience unique careers that are not yet sufficiently understood, and more people than ever before are pursuing such careers. The research on project management and careers is therefore urgently needed in order to better understand the processes and systems shaping the careers of project managers. We address this gap by reviewing several key career theories and constructs and examining how these are mobilized to understand project managers’ careers in existing research. Our main conclusion is that boundaryless career theory has been the dominant career perspective in project management research, whereas other career theories—specifically protean career theory, social cognitive career theory, career construction theory, and sustainable career theory—are far less often mobilized as a basis for studies. We also find that some of the most popular constructs in careers research, such as career success and employability, have been used in recent project management research. However, their use in these studies is often implicit and does not necessarily leverage existing work from the careers field. We argue that there is strong potential for further and more systematic integration between project management and careers research in order to enrich both fields, and we offer a research agenda as a starting point.