Job search methods,job search outcomes,and job satisfaction of college graduates: a comparison of race and sex

A nationally representative sample of college graduates (N =11,152) were surveyed regarding their job‐seeking behaviors and outcomes. Race and sex differences among the job search strategies used, number of job interviews, number of job offers, annual salary, and job satisfaction were examined. Results indicated significant race and sex differences in job search methods used. There were significant differences in underemployment and job satisfaction as a function of race, and in underemployment and annual salary as a function of sex. There were no significant differences in number of job interviews or job offers regardless of race or sex.     

Proactive personality and job performance: a social capital perspective

This study of 126 employee-supervisor dyads examined a mediated model of the relationship between proactive personality and job performance. The model, informed by the social capital perspective, suggests that proactive employees reap performance benefits by means of developing social networks that provide them the resources and latitude to pursue high-level initiatives. Structural equation modeling suggested that the relationship between proactive personality and job performance is mediated by network building and initiative taking on the part of the employee.     

Career adaptability,job search self-efficacy and outcomes: A three-wave investigation among Chinese university graduates

Based on career construction theory, the current research examined the role of career adaptability in Chinese university graduates' job search process (N = 270). Results from a three-wave survey study showed that the four dimension of career adaptability (measured at wave 1) correlated positively with university graduates' job search self-efficacy (measured at wave 2) and their employment status (measured at wave 3). Among graduates who became employed, career adaptability dimensions also predicted positively their person–environment (P–E) fit perceptions (measured at wave 3). The results further showed that with the effects of demographics (gender, age, education level and major) and family background (family economical status and parental education) controlled for, when putting the four dimensions of career adaptability together, career concern and career control served as the strongest predictors for job search self-efficacy, which further mediated the positive effects of these two dimensions on employment status. In addition, career control also had indirect effect on P–E fit through the mediation of job search self-efficacy. Additional analyses using the global indicator of career adaptability also supported this mediation model such that career adaptability significantly predicted employment status and P–E fit, with these relations mediated by job search self-efficacy. These findings carry implications for research on career construction theory, as well as career education and career counseling practices.     

Career adaptability,job search self-efficacy and outcomes: A three-wave investigation among Chinese university graduates

Based on career construction theory, the current research examined the role of career adaptability in Chinese university graduates' job search process (N = 270). Results from a three-wave survey study showed that the four dimension of career adaptability (measured at wave 1) correlated positively with university graduates' job search self-efficacy (measured at wave 2) and their employment status (measured at wave 3). Among graduates who became employed, career adaptability dimensions also predicted positively their person–environment (P–E) fit perceptions (measured at wave 3). The results further showed that with the effects of demographics (gender, age, education level and major) and family background (family economical status and parental education) controlled for, when putting the four dimensions of career adaptability together, career concern and career control served as the strongest predictors for job search self-efficacy, which further mediated the positive effects of these two dimensions on employment status. In addition, career control also had indirect effect on P–E fit through the mediation of job search self-efficacy. Additional analyses using the global indicator of career adaptability also supported this mediation model such that career adaptability significantly predicted employment status and P–E fit, with these relations mediated by job search self-efficacy. These findings carry implications for research on career construction theory, as well as career education and career counseling practices.     

主动性人格:机制与未来走向

主动性人格(proactive personality)作为一种独特的人格特质,指采取积极行动去影响所处环境的一种个体倾向。主动性高的个体善于发现机会,抓住机会,并且不断地坚持目标。研究者梳理了主动性人格的起源和概念、测量方法,阐述了主动性人格的实施效果、中介机制和调节机制,强化了中国本土文化的权变作用。未来研究应继续完善主动性人格的概念、开发符合时代特征的测量工具、拓展其研究层次与实施效果。     

The effects of college major and job field congruence on job satisfaction

This study investigated predictors of job satisfaction and builds on previous research on the effects of bachelor’s degree majors and job field congruence on job satisfaction. Data on workers’ job experiences in 2001 were matched to those workers’ college experiences across 30 institutions and background characteristics up to 25 years earlier. With statistical controls for demographic, socioeconomic, and academic characteristics, a final sample of 2515 college graduates was used to test hypotheses centered on the possibility that a causal order relates education and job satisfaction. Specifically, college degree majors, measures of both actual and perceived congruence, as well as income were examined in relation to three dimensions of job satisfaction. Results support hypotheses that income and congruence both mediate the effects of majors on job satisfaction, and identify that two different measures of congruence are causally related to intrinsic dimensions of job satisfaction.     

Five-factor model of personality and job satisfaction: a meta-analysis

This study reports results of a meta-analysis linking traits from the 5-factor model of personality to overall job satisfaction. Using the model as an organizing framework, 334 correlations from 163 independent samples were classified according to the model. The estimated true score correlations with job satisfaction were -.29 for Neuroticism, .25 for Extraversion, .02 for Openness to Experience, .17 for Agreeableness, and .26 for Conscientiousness. Results further indicated that only the relations of Neuroticism and Extraversion with job satisfaction generalized across studies. As a set, the Big Five traits had a multiple correlation of .41 with job satisfaction, indicating support for the validity of the dispositional source of job satisfaction when traits are organized according to the 5-factor model.     

Unemployed people in search of a job: Reconsidering the role of search behavior

A three-wave longitudinal study of unemployed persons in Croatia was used to examine the antecedents of job-seeking behavior and reemployment. A series of demographic, motivational and job-constraint variables were posited to influence job-seeking behavior, which, in turn, was hypothesized to affect (re)employment. The participants were surveyed in 2003 (N = 1138), and their employment status was checked in 2004 (N = 601) and 2005 (N = 452). Regression analyzes supported only one slice of the model—the antecedent-job-search relations. All motivational variables, in particular employment commitment and perceived financial strain, proved to be relatively strong predictors of job-search intensity. However, they appeared to be only weakly related to the (re)employment outcome. Demographic variables—in particular education, age, and employment duration—appeared to be the main determinants of (re)employment, operating presumably through their influence on employers’ hiring decisions. It was suggested that existing theory and heuristic frameworks overstate the importance of job-seeking activity. Further research is suggested to examine why purposeful and proactive job searching does not pay more.     

Understanding the dynamic relationships among personality, mood, and job satisfaction: A field experience sampling study

This study investigated the within-individual relationship between mood and job satisfaction, and examined the role of personality characteristics in moderating this relationship. The design of the study involved an experience sampling methodology (ESM); 27 employees completed mood and job satisfaction surveys at four different times during the day for a period of four weeks, resulting in a total of 1907 observations. Results showed that within-individual variance comprised 36% of the total variance in job satisfaction, and mood explained 29% of the within-individual variance in job satisfaction. Second, mood and job satisfaction were related both within and across individuals. Third, two personality traits—Neuroticism and Extraversion—were associated with average levels of mood. Fourth, within-individual variability in mood was significantly related to within-individual variability in job satisfaction, and variability in both mood and job satisfaction was predicted by Neuroticism. Finally, personality impacted the degree of association between mood and job satisfaction within individuals.     

Mind the ad: How personality requirements affect older and younger job seekers' job attraction

Age discrimination may explain lower labour market chances of older and younger job seekers. What remains underresearched, however, is how older/younger job seekers might self-select out from early recruitment procedures due to stigmatizing information in job ads. Building on theories of metastereotypes and the linguistic category model, two experimental studies investigated how personality requirements that older/younger job seekers hold negative metastereotypes about and the way in which these requirements are worded (behavioural vs. dispositional) affected their job attraction. Within-participant mediation analyses showed that as expected, job attraction was higher for older (N = 123, aged 50 years or more) and younger (N = 151, 30 years or less) job seekers when requirements were worded in a behavioural way (e.g., ‘You can be flexible’), compared with a dispositional way (e.g., ‘You are flexible’). This relation was mediated by perceptions of challenge among younger but not older job seekers. Contrary to expectations, perceptions of threat did not explain the effects of negatively metastereotyped personality requirements on job attraction. Understanding how job seekers perceive information in job ads might help recruiters to design age-sensitive recruitment policies.     

Proactive personality and career adaptability: The role of thriving at work

This is a pioneer study to examine the mechanism underlying the relationship between proactive personality and career adaptability. Using a moderated mediation approach, it tested the mediating effect of thriving on this relationship and the moderating effect of proactive personality on the relationship between thriving and career adaptability. Three hundred and sixty-four adult employees participated in the survey study. Results demonstrated that proactive personality first promoted individuals' thriving at work, which in turn led to improved career adaptability. In addition, the effect of thriving on career adaptability was found to be stronger for those individuals with low rather than high proactive personality. In supporting this, the moderated mediation analysis further indicated that low proactive individuals, compared to their high proactive counterparts, relied more on thriving when developing career adaptability resources. These findings have important implications for career research and career counseling practices.     

School-to-work transition: Mentor career support and student career planning,job search intentions,and self-defeating job search behavior

We hypothesized and tested a model where mentor career support predicts college student career planning, job search intentions, and self-defeating job search behavior via student career self-efficacy. Using survey responses collected at two points in time from college students near graduation who were mentored by working business professionals for 8 months in a formal hybrid university-sponsored mentoring program, results showed that mentor career support was positively related to student career planning and job search intentions and negatively related to student self-defeating job search behavior. In addition, results indicated that student career self-efficacy fully mediated the relations between mentor career support and the outcomes. The findings have important implications for future mentoring and job search research. They also provide practical guidance for improving college students' career planning and job searches.     

Networking as a job search behaviour: A social network perspective

Although networking is typically recommended as a job search strategy in the popular press, research on networking as a job search behaviour is scarce. On the basis of social network theory, the present study investigated whether the structure and composition of job seekers' social network determined their networking behaviour and moderated its relationship with job search and employment outcomes. The data were collected in a large, representative sample of 1,177 unemployed Flemish job seekers, using a two‐wave longitudinal design. Job seekers with a larger social network and with stronger ties in their network spent more time networking, beyond individual differences in extraversion and conscientiousness. Networking explained incremental variance in job offers beyond job seekers' use of print advertising, the internet, and public employment services, but not in employment outcomes. Some evidence was found indicating that networking might be more effective for job seekers whose social network contains weaker and higher‐status ties.     

Minimizing strain and maximizing learning: the role of job demands, job control, and proactive personality

Using a sample of 268 production employees, this study extended research on R. Karasek's (1979) demands-control model of stress in 2 ways. First, results show that R. Karasek's proposed interaction between demands and control when predicting strain occurred only for more proactive employees. This 3-way interaction helps reconcile previous inconsistent findings about the interaction between demands and control when predicting strain. Second, the study extends research by investigating the demands-control interaction and the moderating influence of proactive personality in relation to learning-oriented outcomes (perceived mastery, role breadth self-efficacy, and production ownership). There were no 3-way interactions among the variables when predicting these learning-oriented outcomes, but all were important predictors. These results show (a) that demands and control can influence learning as proposed in the dynamic version of the demands-control model and (b) that proactive personality plays an important moderating role.     

Mood and personality: A search for the causal relationship1

Previous findings of correlations between mood and personality variables were noted. It was suggested that the establishment of a causal relationship was crucially important, not merely to the understanding of how mood is related to personality but to the conceptualization of mood as a source of error in personality measurement as well. A prior attempt to establish a causal role for mood failed, but may have done so for methodological reasons. The present study investigated the influence of a mood manipulation on personality measures. There was also an opportunity to replicate prior correlational findings independent of the effect of the mood manipulation. College students were asked to think of happy, sad, or affectively neutral events and then filled out several personality measures. A manipulation check confirmed that different moods were induced by this procedure. The prior correlations between mood and personality variables were replicated, but the mood manipulation did not affect any of the personality measures. The implications of these results for personality measurement and for the relation between mood and behavior were discussed.     

On the heritability of job satisfaction: the mediating role of personality

In this article the authors investigate the extent to which traits reflecting individual differences in personality and affectivity explain or mediate genetic influences on job satisfaction. Using estimates of the dispositional source of job satisfaction according to 2 dispositional frameworks--the five-factor model and positive affectivity-negative affectivity (PA-NA)--and behavioral-genetic estimates of the heritabilities of job satisfaction and the dispositional factors, the authors computed the proportion of genetic variance in job satisfaction that is explained by these trait frameworks. Results indicate that the affectivity model is a stronger mediator of genetic effects on job satisfaction than the five-factor model. PA and NA mediate about 45% of the genetic influences on job satisfaction, whereas the five-factor model mediates approximately 24% of these genetic effects.     

The higher you climb: Dark side personality and job level

The purpose of this study was to explore the idea that there are dark side personality differences in the profiles of people at different levels in organizations. This study replicates and extends existing leadership research by focusing on self‐defeating behavioral tendencies. A Danish consultancy provided data on 264 adults based on assessment reports. This paper explored linear and quadratic relationships between personality and de facto job level. More senior managers scored high on Cluster B/Moving Against Others scales of Bold, Colorful and Imaginative, and low on Cautious and Dutiful. These Danish data are compared to data from Great Britain and New Zealand which show very similar findings. Practice should take into account that dark side personality traits associated with an assertive, sometimes hostile, interpersonal orientation, predict leadership level up to a point.     

Evaluating the college sophomore problem: the case of personality and politics

College sophomores feature prominently in social scientific research but are frequently criticized for providing unrepresentative, invalid, and unreliable data. Using the case of personality and politics, the present authors evaluated those critiques, concluding that college sophomores are not representative of the general adult population on all 5 factors of personality. Despite this limitation, analyses show that the relationship between personality and political opinions is virtually identical for college students and a comparison group of adults. Further, a range of reliability statistics suggests that college students provide reliable data on personality. College students are not a panacea for the problems of participant recruiting, but they should not be discounted as unreliable and invalid, either. In many cases, the so-called "college-sophomore problem" is not a problem.