Career self-management as resource management through action regulation: Theoretical concepts and practice implications for promoting career management skills

Schläpfer, D., Wilhelm, F., & Hirschi, A. (2023). Career self-management as resource management through action regulation: Theoretical concepts and practice implications for promoting career management skills. In A. Chant, J. Katsarov, J. Pouyaud, & L. Sovet, (Eds.), Developing Career Management Skills. NICE Foundation.

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Abstract

Career management skills are important in today’s labor market, which is characterized by increased volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. This chapter aims to provide a better understanding of core career management skills by presenting a framework which sees career self-management as an active process of resource management. Based on this perspective, career self-management consists of building, maintaining, and applying knowledge and skills, psychological (motivational/ attitudinal), and contextual resources through various career self-management behaviors. We moreover suggest how career self-management skills can be enhanced throughout the lifespan by presenting career self-management as an action-regulation process. This process consists of four phases in terms of (1) goal setting and development, (2) mapping the environment for goal-relevant resources and barriers, (3) planning and execution of behaviors, and (4) monitoring and feedback processing. Based on this conceptualization of career self-management, we discuss how practitioners can assist clients in this process across different action regulation phases of career self-management.

Keywords: career resources, action regulation, career self-management, career self-management skills

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Action regulation at the work–family interface: Nomological network and work-family consequences

Hirschi, A., von Allmen, N., Burmeister, A., & Zacher, H. (2022). Action regulation at the work–family interface: Nomological network and work-family consequences. Journal of Business and Psychology, 37(2), 369-387. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-021-09751-6

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Abstract

Pursuing personally valued goals in work and family is important for many people, yet research has only partially addressed how individuals can actively manage the work–family interface. We examined the role of action regulation at the work-family interface (AR-WF) as an integrated individual-level approach to attain favorable work-family outcomes through the selection and pursuit of goals at the work-family interface. We investigated the relation of AR-WF to theoretically-derived correlates and outcomes in two time-lagged studies with samples from the United States and Germany, based on a newly developed and validated measure to assess AR-WF. Overall, results showed that AR-WF is positively related to dispositional self-regulation, work and family role commitment, work and family goal regulation, and work and family social support. In contrast, AR-WF was largely unrelated to work and family role demands and segmentation or integration boundary enactment. AR-WF further positively related to work and family goal attainment, as well as work–family enrichment beyond related constructs. However, AR-WF was also positively related to increased work-to-family conflict. We discuss how a focus on action regulation can be useful for attaining a better understanding of the active role that people play in managing multiple role demands at the work-family interface.

 Keywords: work–family interface; action regulation; boundary management; multiple roles

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