Career Development in Contextual Constraints:Testing and Extending the Psychology of Working Theory
As one of the most influential theories in the career field in recent years,the Psychology of Working Theory has evoked a considerable amount of empirical research.PWT emphasized the role of contextual constraints(e.g.,social status,marginalization,economic constraints)on individuals'career development,criticizing the biased premise of most career theories and studies that people have the freedom and autonomy to make career decisions.PWT regarded decent work as a vital precursor of people's work fulfillment and well-being and proposed that contextual constraints would influence people's gaining decent work through two internal factors,including work volition and career adaptability.The effects of contextual constraints on internal factors and decent work were moderated by proactive personality,critical consciousness,social support,and economic conditions.Many studies supported the mediation hypothesis about work volition.However,the mediating hypothesis of career adaptability was relatively ignored.In addition,few PWT studies concerned or supported the moderating hypotheses.Wang and her colleagues(2019)tested the mediating effect of work volition between subjective social status(SSS)and decent work and the moderating effects of social support and proactive personality in the framework of PWT for Chinese employees.However,they did not include career adaptability into the model,which made it unable to know the unique effects of each of the two mediators,and neither did they find the buffering effects of social support and proactive personality.This study thus tested the mediating effects of work volition and career adaptability in the relation between SSS and decent work,and further explored the moderation of self-control.The ability to pursue goals(e.g.self-control)was important to overcome the contextual constraints and to obtain decent work,but such factors were neglected in PWT and its empirical studies.The meaning of work was added as an outcome variable since the sense of meaninglessness has been more and more salient in Chinese people's life(Xu,2016)and we would like to know whether the PWT model could explain the individual differences in the meaning of work.The latent moderate structural equations(Klein & Moosbrugger,2000)with a large sample of Chinese working people(n=606)were applied to testified the hypotheses.The results supported the mediation hypotheses.SSS positively predicted decent work through work volition and career adaptability and decent work positively predicted work satisfaction and meaning of work with more than 60％of the variances explained.Self-control moderated the relationship between SSS and work volition.However,the moderating effect was contradictory to our expectation.For people with low self-control,SSS had a weaker effect on work volition.In other words,people who had high SSS(i.e.low contextual constraint)will benefit more from self-control.Our study and previous studies with Chinese samples(Wang et al.,2019)both suggested that internal resources,such as proactive personality and self-control,cannot buffer the negative effects of contextual constraints and were of limited benefit for people with high contextual constraints.That means,if we want to help people who are in disadvantaged social groups with their career development and mental health,more support and patience would be needed.If people want to overcome the contextual constraints and obtain decent work,they need to make more efforts than people with privileges do.Whether and how the accumulation of resources would break the vicious cycle is what can be investigated in future research.
subjective social statusdecent workwork volitionself-controlthe psychology of working theory
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