This project addresses the dynamic role of personal resources in overcoming occupational disadvantages and facilitating career development. It contributes to vulnerability researches by focusing on the impact of personal resources (especially their psychological and social dimensions) on occupational trajectories and work-related or general well-being. A number of personal resources, including work-related attitudes and behaviours, promote proactive response to occupational demands and thus help maintain employees’ well-being. This programme applies a multidimensional conceptualization of well-being and investigates the role of diverse resources mechanisms (in particular, career adaptability and character strengths).
In order to better explain the adaptive role of personal resources, it is necessary to investigate them in interaction with vocational, social, and life-course contexts to have a broader understating of adults’ resilience towards occupational challenges and life stressors.
IP7–Career paths explore three research gaps:
- Interaction between personal resources, life-course stressors and social variables.
- Focus of the dynamic nature of well-being by investigating the interaction between employee resources and working conditions.
- How vulnerabilities and strengths may carry over from the careers to the personal life domain, and vice versa.
Research questions
How is the use of personal career development resources (and its long-term benefits) embedded in the wider social and personal context?
Groups of career trajectories and their associated family and health dimensions are distinguished in order to define different groups to see how the use of personal resources affects the relationship between these trajectories and work and general well-being. This project should provide new insights into how specific occupational roles and life events act as boundary conditions for the use of personal resources to counteract vulnerability.
What is the interplay between working conditions and personal resources in the dynamics of workers’ well-being?
Researchers investigate the dynamic interplay of self-regulatory actions and vocational contexts in predicting resilience, need satisfaction, and well-being at work. They focus on the way people are able to maintain their well-being when facing difficult workplace situations. They expect to shed light on how micro-and meso-level factors affect the dynamics of workplace vulnerability and how it can be prevented.
What are the cross-domain spillover effects in exhaustion and recovery?
Middle adulthood is a stage when people occupy more demanding roles simultaneously than at any other life stage. Particular focuses of this research are on how people draw boundaries between work and leisure/family, the consequences of perceived boundaries for well-being, and how gender-related expectations influence the drawing of boundaries and their impact on well-being.
