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Coping with Age-Related Decline at Work: The Implications for Other Life Domains and Career Sustainability
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Author: Tatiana S. Rowson, Henley Business School, U. of Reading
Author: Maria Del Carmen Gonzalez-White, Heriot Watt U.
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This study aims to explore qualitatively how older flight attendants working for Middle East airlines use Selection, Optimisation and Compensation [SOC] strategies to cope with diminishing resources at work because of ageing and how the use of these strategies affects other life domains and future career possibilities. Semi-structured interviews with five single female Middle East-based flight attendants over the age of 40 were conducted. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was used for the study design and analysis. The study found that flight attendants often use strategies such as Selection, Optimisation and Compensation, to make up for losses associated with ageing. The use of these strategies allows them to maintain an attractive appearance and fitness to cope with the demanding flight schedule similar to their younger counterparts. In this process, these women deplete the resources of other life domains, sacrificing them to achieve their occupational goals. Workers and organisations should consider the short and long-term consequences of using SOC strategies to meet occupational goals and cope with work demands in the light of ageing. Moreover, the impact on other life domains should be considered as well as the implications for career sustainability and workability. For researchers, the study highlights the importance of conducting more qualitative studies to explore the SOC model, so the experiences of participants can be investigated in more depth and areas of concern can be identified.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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Do We Act as Old as We Feel? An Examination of Subjective Age and Job Crafting in Late Career (WITHDRAWN)
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Author: Noemi Nagy, Kalaidos U. of Applied Sciences
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Careers Best Student Paper Award Nominee
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William H. Newman Award Nominee
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Ageing research calls for a focus on the mechanisms that can explain effects of ageing beyond the purely chronologic marker of age. To address this issue, the present study focuses on subjective age as a holistic construct that is related to various developmental and motivational processes and allows deeper insights into the interindividual variability of the ageing experience in older workers. Specifically, the current study examines on a sample of N = 485 late career employees (mean age 54 years), if subjective age is related to job crafting behaviours of older workers and whether job crafting is related to higher levels of work meaningfulness in late career. Results indicate that subjective age is significantly negatively related to job crafting behaviour over and above the effect of chronological age, self-rated health and workplace autonomy. Job crafting, in turn, significantly predicted work meaningfulness, above the effect of workplace autonomy. In sum, our study provides evidence for the utility of psychological representations of ageing to understand job crafting at work for an increasingly important segment of the working population.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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Selfish Start, Selfless Senior? Shifting Expectations in Academic Career Advancement
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Author: Stephanie Rehbock, TUM School of Management, Technical U. of Munich
Author: Claudia Peus, Technical U. of Munich
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Reaching tenure constitutes a key step in academic career advancement which requires numerous peer-reviewed publications as the key performance criterion. However, once tenure is reached, professors’ demands are further increasing and slightly changing from previous career stages. Although formal selection and promotion criteria in academia are well understood, we lack insights of decision-makers’ informal expectations of which attributes are needed in the pre- and post-tenure career stage. This study is the first to explore the question of how professors themselves describe desired attributes required for success before and after reaching tenure. Our findings challenge the dominant view derived from stereotype research on academics as lone, independent, and self-focused. We find that self-oriented attributes mainly apply to career advancement but less to senior stages of an academic career. Professors report that requirements post-tenure change tremendously towards communal–other-oriented–attributes and behaviors. Based on these findings, we discuss important implications for academic career research and practice to contribute to more transparency and diversity in academic career advancement.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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Linking Mentoring to Emotional Exhaustion through Job Content Plateau: A Moderated Mediation Model
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Author: Hui-Ting Lee, National Chiao Tung U.
Author: Hao-Hsin Hsu, Taiwan Institute of Economic Research
Author: Kuo-Yang Kao, National Chiao Tung U.
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The current study is important to address how career mentoring may help employees to deal with job-related career bottleneck (e.g., monotony in job content). Based on the conservation of resources theory, we suggest that career mentoring can be a critical resource in the workplace to decrease perceived job content plateaus and to reduce emotional exhaustion (through job content plateaus). This study also aimed for a deeper understanding of how organizational factors can increase the influence of career mentoring on job content plateaus and emotional exhaustion. Given this aim, we propose that perceived organizational support can be considered as an additional organizational resource for protégés, strengthening direct and indirect relationships between career mentoring and job content plateaus and emotional exhaustion (via job content plateaus). Two-wave data were collected from a sample of 353 full-time employees in Germany. Results revealed career mentoring as negatively related to emotional exhaustion through the perception of job content plateaus. Additionally, results indicated that the direct relationship between career mentoring and job content plateaus, and the indirect relationship between career mentoring and emotional exhaustion, were strengthened when employees received high organizational support. Relevant theoretical and practical implications for career and mentoring research are discussed in this study.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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