Jessie Koen

Coping proactively with economic stress: career adaptability in the face of job insecurity, job loss, unemployment, and underemployment

Economic stressors such as job insecurity, job loss, unemployment, and underemployment cause severe difficulties for the workers affected, their families, organizations, and societies overall. Consequently, most past research has taken a thoroughly negative perspective on economic stress, addressing its diverse negative consequences and the ways that people try to cope with them. And even when following the advice provided by the scientific literature, people affected by economic stress will usually end up being off worse than they were before the onset of the stressor. The current chapter pays credit to this perspective yet also tries to counterbalance it with an alternative one. While acknowledging the vast amount of literature outlining the negative consequences of economic stress on peoples’ well-being and careers, some literature also points at opportunities for a more positive perspective. More specifically, we argue that affected people can use a wide repertoire of behaviors for handling their current situation. Of particular promise in this regard is the concept of career adaptability, generally defined as the ability to change to fit into new career-related circumstances. Indeed, studies show that under certain conditions, career adaptability can facilitate peoples search for not just any job but for a qualitatively better job, thus breaking through the spiral of losses usually associated with economic stress. For the purpose of this argument, we link career adaptability to the concept of proactive coping, analyzing how and under which conditions career adaptability may present a contextualized form of proactive coping. We then address known personal and situational antecedents of career adaptability and show how career adaptability may be fostered and trained among different types of job seekers. We end this chapter with a discussion of open questions as well as directions for future research.

Person–environment fits as drivers of commitment

This chapter describes how employees’ fit experiences drive their commitments to their job, supervisor, team, and organization. Employees commit – that is, become attached – when they experience positive affective reactions as a consequence of the correspondence (versus discrepancy) between their attributes and those in their work environment. Because work environments comprise varying domains (for example, the job, the supervisor, the team, and the organization) to which employees may connect, the authors suggest that employees can experience multiple fits, which combine into holistic fit perceptions and result in various types of commitment. They distinguish two types of fit that inform these holistic perceptions: the needs, preferences and values that all people share (universal fits) and those that vary among individuals (distinctive fits). Finally, the authors delineate several opportunities for research and practice relating to how different fit perceptions emerge, how they combine, and how they might inform an organization’s selection and change practices.

“A whole new future” – identity construction among disadvantaged young adults

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how disadvantaged young adults construct a positive work-related identity in their transition from unemployment to employment, and what enables or constrains a successful transition. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with 29 apprentices of a reemployment program (Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen). The qualitative data were complemented by data on participants’ reemployment status one year after the program ended. Findings Identity construction was not preceded by clear motives or “possible selves.” Rather, serendipitous events led to participation in the reemployment program, after which provisional selves seemed to emerge through different pathways. The data also suggested that disadvantaged young adults had to discard their old selves to consolidate their new identity. Research limitations/implications A successful transition from unemployment to employment may require that old selves must be discarded before new selves can fully emerge. Given that our qualitative design limits the generalizability of the findings, the authors propose a process model that deserves further empirical examination. Practical implications A clear employment goal is not always required for the success of a reemployment intervention: interventions should rather focus on accommodating the emergence and consolidation of provisional selves. Yet, such programs can be simultaneously effective and unhelpful: especially group identification should be monitored. Originality/value Most research assumes that people are driven by specific goals when making a transition. The current study shows otherwise: the factors that enable or constrain a successful transition are not to be found in people’s goals, but rather in the process of identity construction itself.