Proactive motivation and engagement in career behaviors: Investigating direct, mediated, and moderated effects

By A. Hirschi, Bora Lee, Erik J. Porfeli, F. W. Vondracek. 2013

157 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Proactive career behaviors become increasingly important in today's career environment, but little is known about how and when motivational patterns affect individual differences. In a six-month longitudinal study among German university students (Study 1; N = 289) it was demonstrated that motivation in terms of “can do” (self-efficacy and context beliefs), “reason to” (autonomous career goals), and “energized to” (positive affect) significantly predicted career behaviors. Contrary to expectation, negative context beliefs had a positive effect when combined with other motivational states. Study 2 replicated and extended those results by investigating whether “can do” motivation mediates the effect of proactive personality and whether those effects are conditional upon the degree of career choice decidedness. We tested a moderated multiple mediation model with a unique sample of 134 German students, assessed three times, each interval being 6 weeks apart. The results showed that effects of proactivity were partially carried through higher self-efficacy beliefs but not context beliefs. Supporting a moderation model, indirect effects through self-efficacy beliefs were not present for students with very low decidedness.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a193755c94ccde18671dfbf5ef37a1322f841a14

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Citations in the corpus

Modeling dynamics in career construction: Reciprocal relationship between future work self and career exploration (2017, methodology): “The sequential model from indicators of career adaptivity to adaptability and adapting behaviors has received much support from previous studies (Hirschi et al., 2013; Hirschi et al., 2015; Hirschi & Valero, 2015; Nilforooshan & Salimi, 2016; Perera & McIlveen, 2017; Rudolph et al., 2017).”
Contemporary career orientations and career self-management: A review and integration (2021, background): “possibility to examine within-person fluctuations in motivational factors and how they relate to within-person changes in CSM (Hirschi et al., 2013).”
Psychological Capital and Career Outcomes among Final Year University Students: the Mediating Role of Career Engagement and Perceived Employability (2020, background): “Moreover, career engagement involves employing one’s efficacy resources (Hirschi et al. 2013; Kim et al. 2014).”
Career adaptability and its relation to self-regulation, career construction, and academic engagement among Spanish university students (2016, background): “Currently, there are several studies which address engagement in university students (Hirschi et al., 2013) and also with university students who are concurrently in employment (Creed, French, & Hood, 2015).”
Career adaptivity, adaptability, and adapting: A conceptual and empirical investigation (2015, background): “University students need to be concerned with career development and to be actively engaged in career preparation in order to successfully address the challenge of transitioning from university to work (Hirschi et al., 2013).”