Social Cognitive Predictors of Music Majors’ Academic Well-Being and Persistence Intentions

Vocational psychology has devoted limited attention to factors that promote or hinder the career development of musicians. We combined features of social cognitive career theory’s (SCCT) well-being and choice models to examine the experiences of musicians at a formative point in their career development – the first few years of college, during which many would-be musicians either reaffirm or abandon their career paths. Consistent with SCCT, we posited that academic satisfaction and stress would be predicted by favorable levels of self-efficacy, outcome expectations, social support, goal progress, and trait negative affect. We also expected that satisfaction and stress levels would, along with self-efficacy and outcome expectations, predict intentions to persist in undergraduate music majors. Participants were 260 first- and second-year undergraduate music majors. The hypothesized model and a slightly revised version (which added a direct path from goal progress to persistence intentions) produced good fit to the data and accounted well for variation in academic satisfaction, stress, and persistence intentions.

Life goals and proactive career behaviors: The mediating role of visions about the future and the moderating role of intolerance of uncertainty

Dominated by uncertainties, today's work world pushed university students to exhibit proactive career behaviors. Thus, this created a need for more research conducted to determine the variables associated with proactive career behaviors, on the grounds that additional research may contribute to an increase in proactive career behaviors. In this context the study explored the mediating role of visions about the future and the moderating role of intolerance of uncertainty in the relationship between university students' life goals and their proactive career behaviors. The study was carried out with 519 students (299 females and 220 males) studying at a university in the Eastern Mediterranean Region of Turkey. The Scale of Setting Life Goals with Respect to Positive Psychotherapy, the Visions about the Future Scale, the Career Engagement Scale, and the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale were employed as data collection tools. Data were analyzed using correlation analysis, structural equation modeling methods, and regression analysis based on the bootstrap method. The correlation analysis revealed a positive relationship between proactive career behaviors, life goals and visions about the future, and a negative relationship between proactive career behaviors and intolerance of uncertainty. Furthermore, the analyses put forth that visions about the future have a mediating role in the relationship between life goals and proactive career behaviors and that intolerance of uncertainty has a moderating role in the same relationship. Increasing university students' life goals and their visions about the future and reducing their intolerance of uncertainty will help them exhibit proactive career behaviors.

Time Perspective and Career Decision-Making Self-Efficacy: A Longitudinal Examination Among Young Adult Students

This longitudinal study examined the relationship between Zimbardo time perspectives (TPs) and career decision-making self-efficacy (CDMSE). In total, 1,753 young adults participated in the longitudinal study. For the present study, we selected only participants who were students and provided information on TPs, CDMSE, and sociodemographic characteristics ( n = 492, M = 22.97 years, SD = 1.32, 82.9% women). The results of multilevel modeling showed that future orientation and present-hedonistic TPs were positively related to CDMSE, whereas present-fatalistic and past-negative TPs were negatively related to CDMSE. These findings indicate that besides the beneficial effect of widely studied future TP, the negative role of past-negative and present-fatalistic TPs should be considered in connection with the career development of emerging adults.

What if people’s private life constrained their career decisions? Examining the relationship between home-to-career interference and career satisfaction

Purpose

Previous research suggests that employees often make family-related career decisions (Greenhaus and Powell, 2012). The authors extend this idea and explore the concept of “home-to-career interference,” defined as the extent to which people perceive that their private life has constrained their career decisions to date. The authors expect that home-to-career interference has a negative impact on employees’ later career satisfaction via career goal self-efficacy and perceived organizational career support. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors collected quantitative data at three points in time, each six months apart in a Belgian telecommunications organization. Using the full information maximum likelihood path analysis approach, the authors performed analyses on a sample of dual-earner employees.

Findings

The results showed that employees’ home-to-career interference related negatively to their career goal self-efficacy and perceived organizational career support, which were, in turn, positively related to their career satisfaction.

Originality/value

This study contributes to the work-family literature by introducing the concept of home-to-career interference, by clarifying the mechanisms through which home-to-career interference relates to career satisfaction and by testing these relationships using a three-wave longitudinal design.

SCCT Research in the International Context

Since its introduction in 1994, social cognitive career theory (SCCT) has attracted attention from researchers and practitioners in the United States and other countries. This article provides a review of selected research performed outside the United States regarding SCCT’s interest, choice, performance, and satisfaction models. Results of a database search identified 37 studies, which contained 41 independent samples from 21 countries and were published in the English language. The majority of these studies were conducted in Asian (e.g., China and Taiwan) and European (e.g., Portugal, Germany, and Italy) countries and tested the interest/choice and satisfaction models in adolescent and college student samples who were enrolled in courses or majors related to the field of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM; or Holland’s Investigative and Realistic themes). Existing international SCCT research offers robust evidence for the mediating role of self-efficacy, but less consistent support for that of outcome expectations, in the relations of proximal contextual factors to outcomes of interest, choice goals or goal progress, and academic or job satisfaction. Additionally, this review provides preliminary evidence for mastery experience and physiological state as two key sources of efficacy beliefs and for the effects of personality traits (e.g., positive affect and emotional stability) on academic or job satisfaction. Results of a recent meta-analysis are also summarized to offer an empirical synthesis of international SCCT research testing the choice model. Based on this review, directions for future international SCCT research are highlighted, and suggestions for career counseling are discussed.

Challenging the Uniformity Myth in Career Counseling Outcome Studies

This study aimed to challenge the “uniformity myth” in career counseling outcome studies—that is, a tendency toward studying career counseling clients as homogenous, implicitly assuming that the same outcomes would be beneficial to all clients. To this end, we examined the role of clients’ initial career counseling goals. We hypothesized that a client’s career counseling goals would affect (1) which outcomes the client is likely to attain through career counseling and (2) which outcomes he or she would most benefit from (in terms of improved well-being). Hypotheses were tested using data from a three-wave study with Flemish adult career counseling clients. We included six potential career counseling goals and corresponding outcomes: (1) increasing self-awareness, (2) increasing opportunity awareness, (3) making a career decision, (4) finding a new job, (5) improving work–family balance, and (6) improving work relationships. We found that clients were more likely to attain outcomes that matched their initial career counseling goals and less likely to attain other outcomes. In addition, goal attainment (i.e., the attainment of outcomes that match a client’s initial goals)—but not nongoal attainment (i.e., the attainment of outcomes that do not correspond to a client’s initial goals)—related to clients’ subsequent career and life satisfaction. Implications for career counseling research and practice are discussed.

VaMoS

Knowing our values, motives, and skills enables us to achieve a better match of person and job characteristics, which leads to satisfaction and well-being. However, discrepancies between one’s individual values, motives, and skills occur frequently and entail strain and lower satisfaction. We developed an instrument to address this problem systematically, VaMoS (Affective Values, Cognitive Motives and Skills) (1) provides an efficient way to assess important characteristics with only one questionnaire and (2) detects conflicts between them, which can be solved using career counseling to enhance satisfaction and improve work–life balance. A first online study ( n = 341) was used to reduce the initially developed items based on statistical properties. A second sample ( n = 574) confirmed the statistical model and gave initial evidence of the validity of the theoretical model: A discrepancy between affective values, cognitive motives, and skills was positively related among others with strain and negatively related to work–life balance and satisfaction.

Calling, Goals, and Life Satisfaction

The present study examined the role of goals in the relation between calling and life satisfaction in a diverse, adult sample. Building off the self-concordance model of goal progress, the current study explored whether career goal self-efficacy (CGSE) mediated the relation between calling and life satisfaction and whether this mediation was moderated by intrinsic, extrinsic, self-transcendence, or physical self goal aspirations. We found CGSE to partially mediate the relation between calling and life satisfaction. Additionally, self-transcendence goals and physical self goals moderated this mediation such that, for people high in calling, the mediation only existed for those with high self-transcendence goals or low physical self goals. These results suggest that people with callings may need to have self-transcendence goals and avoid physical self goals in order for the confidence in their ability to achieve career goals to mediate the relation between their sense of calling and life satisfaction. Limitations and implications for future research are discussed.