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Psycho-social Career Meta-capacities pp 19–33Cite as

Using Protean Career Attitude to Facilitate a Positive Approach to Unemployment

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Abstract

The rise in unemployment rates associated with the global financial crisis mean that a timely understanding is needed of the ways in which a person’s career attitude influences their reactions to job loss. Much of the research into unemployment has focused on what people lose during unemployment rather than what people can potentially gain during unemployment. In this paper, we deliberately adopt a “positive deviance” approach (Marsh et al., British Medical Journal, 329:1177–1179, 2004) to unemployment and study the attitudes and behaviors that enable people to find successful solutions during job loss. Specifically, we suggest that protean career attitude is a positive factor that can be built upon during unemployment to enhance successful re-employment. The chapter outlines a 6-month longitudinal study that assesses the influence of protean career attitude on self esteem, job search, re-employment, career growth and job improvement. By studying the positive processes through which people positively deviate during unemployment, we can offer unemployed people new ways to create change for themselves.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In all the hypotheses presented in this paper, protean career attitude is comprised of self-direction and being values-driven.

  2. 2.

    The Australian Government provides welfare payments to unemployed people in the form of a ‘basic living’ allowance. As such, only people who do not have enough money to pay for the basic necessities of life (e.g. rent, food, bills) are eligible to receive Federal Assistance. The receipt and amount of Federal assistance given by the Australian Government to unemployed people is determined by their assets, savings, and debts. If the unemployed individual is married or in a de facto relationship, their partner’s income, assets, savings, and debts are also taken into account. By only recruiting people who were receiving unemployment benefits we were able to ensure that the financial situation was similar amongst the study participants. Our aim was to reduce the noise associated with economic hardship as this variable has been shown to influence levels of job search intensity and psychological well being during unemployment (Leana and Feldman 1995; Wanberg et al. 2002).

  3. 3.

    Job Network provides assistant to unemployed people to find work. These people may, or may not be, clients with Centrelink (the agency that provides welfare payments).

  4. 4.

    Given that CFA model and SEM models use the same items they are equivalent in terms of statistical fit. The only difference between the two models is that one is correlational between the latent traits and the other posits regression lines.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

    Lea Waters

  2. Northern Illinois University, Illinois, USA

    Jon Briscoe

  3. Boston University, Boston, USA

    Douglas T. Hall

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  1. Lea Waters
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Correspondence to Lea Waters .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Industrial and Organisational Psychology, University of South Africa, Muckleneuk, Gauteng, South Africa

    Melinde Coetzee

Appendix A: Data Bases

Appendix A: Data Bases

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  • WORKLIT (Informit)

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Waters, L., Briscoe, J., Hall, D. (2014). Using Protean Career Attitude to Facilitate a Positive Approach to Unemployment. In: Coetzee, M. (eds) Psycho-social Career Meta-capacities. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00645-1_2

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