Journal of Career Development

This study asserts a theoretical model of academic and work socialization within the family setting. The presumed associations between parents’ work valences, children’s work valences and valence perceptions, and children’s academic interest and achievement are tested. The results suggest that children’s perceptions of parents mediate the relationship between parents’ and children’s self-reported work valences and children’s work valences are, in turn, associated with academic interest and achievement. The results also demonstrate the moderating role of gender, with an indication of parental socialization to work occurring within same-sex parent–child dyads that is not reflected in cross-sex dyads. Implications and limitations of this study are discussed with a special emphasis on the relatively weak association between parents’ self-reported work valence and their children’s perception of them.

The goal of this study was to examine the emotional and personality-related career decision-making difficulties of high school students in Turkish culture, using the model proposed by Saka and Gati. A sample of 523 high school students filled out the Turkish version of the Emotional and Personality-Related Aspects of Career Decision-Making Difficulties (EPCD) questionnaire. Cluster and confirmatory factor analyses supported the ternary classification system of the emotional and personality-related career decision-making difficulties model and questionnaire, thus providing evidence for the cross-cultural validity of the proposed model. Furthermore, the results demonstrated significant associations between making a decision and the emotional and personality career difficulties: students who were decided reported lower emotional and personality-related career difficulties than did undecided students. Generally, there were no differences in EPCD scores between boys and girls, and no effect of type of school and grade was observed.

Using social cognitive career theory as a theoretical foundation, we examined the relationship between mentor and protégé organizational socialization as well as the mediating role of career, psychosocial, and role-modeling support received by protégés. We also examined the moderating role of mentorship formality in the relationship between mentor socialization and the receipt of career, psychosocial, and role-modeling support. Using survey data collected from 209 ongoing mentoring dyads from five banks in Taiwan, regression results indicated that mentor socialization was positively related to career functions and role modeling that protégés received, as well as protégé socialization. Career support partially mediated the relationship between mentor socialization and protégé socialization. Mentorship formality moderated the relationship between mentor socialization and psychosocial support, suggesting that the positive relationship between mentor socialization and psychosocial functions only bears out in informal mentoring relationships. We offer a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

This study investigates burnout and work engagement in layoff survivors. Layoff survivors are defined as individuals who remain working at organizations that have recently had layoffs. Job demands (job insecurity and work overload) and job and personal resources (social support, optimism, career adaptability, and career management self-efficacy) are examined as predictors of burnout and engagement. The sample consists of 203 adults currently working at organizations that downsized within the past year. As hypothesized, job demands had positive relationships with burnout, while social support, optimism, and career management self-efficacy had positive relationships with engagement. Contrary to hypotheses, career adaptability was not positively related to engagement. Engagement also mediated the relationships between several resources and burnout. This study makes a unique contribution to the literature, as little research has examined personal strengths of layoff survivors, in addition to job characteristics.

We explored the relationships between the experience of work–family conflict and levels of distress in the family and at work among a sample of 227 Israeli working mothers. We also examined how role set density (RSD, the number of roles they perform) and personal and environmental resources are related to the women's experience of distress. Work–family conflict resulting from interference of work with family roles (WIF) and from interference of family with work roles (FIW) correlated positively with distress in the family and at work. RSD correlated negatively with distress at work but did not correlate with distress in the family. Perceived social support and personal resources correlated negatively with the women's experience of distress. WIF mediated the relationship between social support and women's experience of distress as well as the relationship between RSD and distress.