Social support and career outcomes

 I have been noticing as I trawl through the literature, how often social support comes up as a predictor of positive career or work related outcomes and I thought I’d just highlight some of the key ways in which social support can impact positively on work and career.

It seems that social support can have a positive impact on people’s career choices, their ability to get the jobs they want, their subsequent satisfaction at work and their psychological resources that help with everything:

Career choices:

·       Social approval is an important determiner of occupational preferences

·       Other people have an impact on career decisions (relational career – Blustein / Schultheiss)

·       Social support correlates with career decidedness (Jemini-Gashi, Duraku & Kelmendi, 2019)

·       Social support predicts engagement with career planning (Hirshi et al., 2011)

·       Social support predicts career exploration (Turan et al., 2014)

 

Getting jobs:

·       Social support helps people to get jobs

·       There is a moderately strong positive relationships between social support and self-esteem, general self-efficacy, and job search self-efficacy (Maddy et al., 2015)

·       It predicts job-search intention and motivation (Van Yperen & Hagedoorn, 2003)

·       It positively relates to job-search intensity and employment status (Van Hooft et al., 2021)

At work:

·       The people we are surrounded by have a huge impact on job satisfaction -co-workers, managers, having a ‘best friend’ at work (Rath & Harter, 201)

·       Connections have an impact on episodic happiness at work (Yates, forthcoming)

·       More social support leads to more satisfaction with career choices (Murtagh et al., 2011)

·       Social support helps lead to a positive outcome of a career shock

·       Friend and co-worker support enhances self-efficacy and through that, has an impact on resilience at work (Wang et al., 2018)

·       Social support makes dissatisfied employees more likely to engage in job crafting

·       Social support enhances work self-efficacy (Korte, 2017)

·       Coping strategies (Ito & Brotheridge, 2003)

Psychological resources:

·       Social support has a positive impact on career optimism (Eva et al., 2020)

·       Positive relationships between social support and self-esteem, general self-efficacy (Maddy et al., 2015)

·       Social support enhances career adaptability (Wang et al., 2015)

This feels like quite a list, to me, and I am quite sure that a bit more effort would have got me much further. We are social animals, aren’t we? And if we’ve evolved to seek out friends and to make connections this is bound to have a wide range of positive benefits for us. Still, I find it’s quite interesting to consider what an influence other people have on so many aspects of our careers.

I wonder what this means for us as career practitioners? What do we do at the moment to foster these kinds of connections? Career work generally takes place in both one-to-one and group contexts, but to what extent do we actually do much in these group settings to try and foster a culture of group support? And are there any other strategies we could adopt to help our job seekers to learn how to develop their own social networks?

I’ll carry on adding to this list as I find new papers – it would be interesting to see how wide the impact of social support is, in career terms.

Career Shocks

There seems to be quite a lot of interest about the whole idea of career shocks in the literature at the moment, so I thought I would try and unpick it to provide a summary. 

What is a career shock?

A career shock happens when an unexpected external event makes you start to question your own career. A career shock can be defined as ‘a disruptive and extraordinary event that is, at least to some degree, caused by factors outside the focal individual’s control and that triggers a deliberate thought process concerning one’s career’ (Akkermans, Seibert, & Mol 2018, p.4). From a career-theory perspective, a career shock is a good example of the interplay between agency and structure – the shock is external (that’s the ‘structure’ bit) but the response is internal (which is where ‘agency’ comes in).

What kinds of shocks are there?

Career shocks can come from all angles. They can personal or interpersonal, within the organisation or outside it. Examples include of the death of a parent, getting a promotion, not getting a promotion, relocating because of a spouse’s job, having children, illness, an economic crash, a pandemic, being made redundant, an earthquake, or unexpected exam results. Career shocks can be negative, such as losing one’s job or a close relative passing away, or positive, such as receiving an unexpected promotion or receiving an award.

What is the impact of a career shock?

Career shocks can lead to both positive and negative changes. Most research suggest that shock valence (ie the emotions you feel about the shock itself) is related to career outcomes (Akkermans et al., 2018), so positive career shocks lead to positive career outcomes and negative shocks to negative outcomes. Kraimer et al. (2019) found that positive career shocks (e.g., receiving a research reward), were related to higher levels of career satisfaction and work engagement among academics, and Blokker et al. (2019) showed that negative shocks undermine the relationship between career competencies and perceptions of external employability in young professionals. Negative career shocks have also been shown to have a detrimental impact on career optimism and job security (Hofer, Spurk & Hirshi, 2020). But this is not always the case and some studies show that negative shocks can lead to positive career outcomes, in particular for those who weren’t all that happy in their jobs in the first place, but who needed an external push to motivate them to take action. For example, Rummel et al. (2019) demonstrated that negative shocks (e.g., being passed over for an anticipated promotion), can lead to longer term positive outcomes such as starting a successful business. And even positive shocks do not invariably lead to positive outcomes – Korotov (2020) showed that positive shocks can cause ambivalent reactions.

Why does a career shock have an impact?

The career shock can have an impact on the choices an individual makes (eg Nair & Chatterjee, 2020, Rummel et al., 2019), their psychological resources including their levels of optimism (Hofer et al., 2020) or sense of agency or their levels of person-job fit through an impact on either demands or resources (Pak et al., 2020). The jarring impact of the shock can also trigger some in-depth reflection about their career path.

Not all shocks are created equal: the bigger the shock, the more destabilising properties it has.

An individual’s pre-existing feelings about work seems to influence the kind of reaction that they had to the shock: People who were satisfied at work pre-shock are more likely to be prompted to do some rational, conscious critical reflection about their careers and their next steps. Those who were dissatisfied pre-shock were more likely to fling themselves spontaneously into action after the shock. For people who felt neutral about their jobs, a career shock can make them realise that they weren’t happy – as the literature says, the shock can surface latent disquiet.

Career shocks and Covid-19

COVID-19 has of course caused a range of different kinds of career shock – both positive and negative. Some people are working harder than ever, some people have lost their jobs, some people can only work from home, and some people have to reinvent how they work (Kniffin et al., 2020). For many the pandemic has given them the space to reflect on their careers, and perhaps to re-evaluate their priorities and values.

How to help following a career shock:

The literature seems to offer a number of suggestions for working with career shocks. First there are some suggestions for things that people can do to shock-proof their careers – traits or skills they can develop which will help them to cope if they do face a shock:

• ·       Good existing levels of psychological resources (social capital, human capital, identity and resilience) can help people to cope better when facing unexpected events.

·       High levels of career adaptability make it more likely that people experiencing career shocks (even negative ones) will end up thriving in their careers (Mansur & Felix, 2020)

• ·       A protean career orientation – one that is self-directed and values driven has been shown to help people to cope when external events surprise them.  

 Then there are suggestions for coaches working with career-shocked clients:

• ·       A career shock often ends up being about a person’s values, and writing sessions can be a great way to help people to identify and articulate what matters to them.
• ·       Time to think. The evidence is clear that taking a bit of time out to reflect on what has happened, on your career journey so far and on your hopes for the future can
• ·       Social support - both a significant other, and a social circle both help with the process of critical reflection (Wordsworth et al., 2021)
• ·       Identity work is what is needed to help people to capitalise on the disruption of the career shock. A clearly articulated continuous identity is particularly important as a way to maintain a sense of a coherent self whilst coping with a transition – a strong sense of identity can help people to see a continuous thread between what they used to do and what they are having to do now.
• ·       Developing career competencies can enable individuals to better capitalize on positive career shocks (Blokker et al., 2019).

And finally, ideas for organisations, to help ensure that their career-shocked employees stay productive and engaged:

• ·       Mentoring can help people to focus on possible future selves
• ·       Organisations who allow or encourage job crafting can help people adjust their work to be more aligned with their identities
• ·       Organisation or supervisor can help them to a better P-O fit (Pak et al., 2020)
• ·       Job embeddedness can buffer the effect of negative shocks on turnover, so keeping your teams close-knit can help (Burton et al., 2010)

 

Further Reading

Akkermans, J., S. E. Seibert, and S. T. Mol. 2018. “Tales of the Unexpected: Integrating Career Shocks in the Contemporary Careers Literature.” SA Journal of Industrial Psychology 44 (1): 1–10. doi:10.4102/sajip.v44i0.1503

Akkermans, J., Seibert, S. E., & Mol, S. T. (2018). Tales of the unexpected: Integrating career shocks in the contemporary careers literature. SA Journal of Industrial Psychology, 44(1), 1-10.

Akkermans, J., Richardson, J., & Kraimer, M. (2020). The Covid-19 crisis as a career shock: Implications for careers and vocational behavior. Journal of Vocational Behavior https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001879120300592

Ghosh, R. (2021). Protean career orientation and career shock due to the pandemic: HRD’s role in supporting intersectional identity work. Human Resource Development International, 1-3.

Hite, L. M., & McDonald, K. S. (2020). Careers after COVID-19: challenges and changes. Human Resource Development International, 23(4), 427-437.

Hofer, A., Spurk, D., & Hirschi, A. (2020). When and why do negative organization-related career shocks impair career optimism? A conditional indirect effect model. Career development international.

Korotov, K. (2021). Executives and career shocks: observations from coaching practice. Career Development International.

Mansur, J., & Felix, B. (2020). On lemons and lemonade: the effect of positive and negative career shocks on thriving. Career Development International.

McKenna, S. (2021). Career shock: the profound effect of COVID-19 on four Australian middle managers. LSE Business Review.

Pak, K., Kooij, D., De Lange, A. H., Meyers, M. C., & van Veldhoven, M. (2020). Unravelling the process between career shock and career (un) sustainability: exploring the role of perceived human resource management. Career Development International.

Rummel, S., Akkermans, J., Blokker, R., & Van Gelderen, M. (2019). Shocks and entrepreneurship: a study of career shocks among newly graduated entrepreneurs. Career Development International.

Wild, B. (2021). Covid-19 as a career shock and its influence on career development for nurses in the Netherlands.

Wordsworth, R., & Nilakant, V. (2021). Unexpected change: Career transitions following a significant extra-organizational shock. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 127, 103555.

Career Theories in Action: What and How

I'm involved in a couple of projects looking at the use of career theories in practice. I've been talking to a lot of career practitioners about their use of theories in practice, and can't help but feel that we're missing a trick. 

The careers advisers I've been talking to do, all, draw on theories, but not that many theories, and not all that often. I feel that something has gone wrong with the system: either we're not coming up with the right theories; or they are not written usefully, or published accessibly; or careers advisers don't value them; or don't know how to use them. 

I've been thinking about why this would be, and I wanted to spend a bit of time unpicking my own assumption that theories are useful. I love a theory, but are they actually useful? Are career conversations better when they include some theories?

Career Theories in Action: What

I think there are two broad types of theories I use in my practice (NB I'm using the word 'theory' very broadly here, to include approaches, models and frameworks).

Theories which inform the process of career coaching. 
There is one approach I use ALL the time, and one I use fairly often. The one I use all the time is Roger's theory of person-centred counselling (AKA humanism, client- or person-centred counselling). I use this as an underpinning philosophy, and it informs my whole understanding of the process: who has the answers (the client), how I should talk to them (open questions, lots of reflective listening) and how I should strive to understand them (unconditional positive regard). This one informs every single career conversation I ever have. 
Next up is the GROW model (or T-GROW, or RE-GROW, or GROWTH), which is my go-to structure for most of my conversations. Specifically, I am entirely sold on the need to set goals for a session, and the value of identifying specific actions for my client to take away. 
Then I think there are half a dozen other approaches that I use quite often. My favourite ones at the moment are strengths, possible selves, ACT, solution focused coaching, art therapy tools, narrative coaching, career style interview, motivational interviewing, MBTI and transactional analysis. 

I draw on two or more of these in every career conversation I have, and I definitely think that these theories make me a better practitioner and add value to my clients. In fact, I might even go so far as to say it is these theories that make me a practitioner - without them, I'm just having a chat.

Theories that help me understand careers  the content of my career conversations 
There are more of these kinds of theories, and I think I can put them in four groups (a slightly artificial division - but this is how I see them):
1) Theories that tell us about people's motivations - what drives them and what makes them happy.
2) Theories that help us to understand career transitions - how and why people change direction, and how they cope
3) Theories about making decisions, and what kinds of factors influence people's choices
4) Theories about how people make decisions - how they learn about jobs and the process of career decision making.

I've identified my go-to theories here, those that most often actually help me to understand my clients' career journeys. I am interested by the fact that less than half of them are career-specific theories most are broader psychological theories. I've also noticed that there are a number of big-hitting career theories that I haven't included. I haven't included them because they don't help me, but I might need to spend some time working out why that is. 

Career Theories in Action: How

As I mentioned earlier, it's easy to see how the process models influence my practice, but with the theories that help to explain the nature of career, the influence is a bit more subtle. I think I can see four ways that they help

1. They help me to understand what is going on with my clients - they offer a shortcut which can help me to see what's going on. This is useful because:
1. It helps me to empathise which makes me a better practitioner
2. It helps me to work out what to do next - what questions to ask, what approaches to use and what direction to take the conversation in
2. I sometimes share the theories explicitly with clients. This offers clients:
1. Validation: it's amazing what an impact it has when clients can see that they are not alone, not strange, not abnormal, and that what they are going though is 'a thing' that lots of other people have experienced too. 
2. Reassurance: if clients can see that other people emerged unscathed from this process, and have found a way through, it can be hugely encouraging to them.
3. For me personally:
1. It's interesting. I'm just interested in people's careers and I just like understanding how this part of the world works
2. It boosts my confidence. I feel more certain that the approaches that I'm using are the right ones and are likely to do what they need to
3. It helps with my credibility. The joy of a Rogerian, person-centred approach is that the client solves all their own problems and provides all of their own solutions. This involves a huge amount of skill on the part of the practitioner, but the more skilled you are, the less the client notices what you have added. But the career theory aspect of my professional expertise is more visible, and makes me feel that my skills and knowledge are more likely to be noticed. This is of course linked to the previous point about confidence, but I think that it's important to our clients and to our profession as a whole that we are seen as experts from the outside.

So that's what I use and how I use it, and I definitely think this makes me a better practitioner and adds value to my clients. 

I haven't come across any research evidence that using theories adds value in career conversations, and I'm sure that career conversations can be hugely helpful without any of this. But that's what people get from talking to their friends and family about careers. What they get from us needs to be a bit different, otherwise what is the point? We need to offer something that our clients can't get elsewhere, and for me, a knowledge of these kinds of theories offers exactly that. 

There is still a job to be done, in making sure the theories are relevant and accessible, making sure that practitioners have the time and motivation to learn about them, and making sure we are all equipped to integrate theories in our practice. And some empirical research would be great, if anyone has a bit of time on their hands...

Career inaction and the psychology of doing nothing

I've come across a new theory that I'm quite excited about. The Theory of Career Inaction (Verbruggen and de Vos, 2020) seems to offer a good explanation of a phenomenon that I have come across many times in my coaching, but haven't ever quite understood. The theory unpicks what's going on with clients who know where they want to go and know what they need to do, but who still do nothing. There is, apparently, a whole wealth of research into 'the psychology of doing nothing' (who knew?) and Verbruggen and De Vos have taken some of their understandings and findings and applied them to career development in the form of their new Career Inaction Theory.

I'll try and give an overview here, but the details of the paper are at the bottom if you want to find out more. 

There are, it seems, two typical human tendencies which are to blame: the tendency to delay decisions, and the tendency to avoid taking action. I'm sure we can all recognise these in ourselves, or others.

The doing-nothing psychologists talk about three inertia-enhancing mechanisms.

1) Fear and anxiety. This stops people from taking action, and these feelings are often exacerbated by uncertain outcomes.

2) Short term-ism. People are more focused on what happens in the short term than the long term, leading them to prioritise short term comforts over long term gains.

3) Cognitive overload. When decisions are too complex, or involve too much information or too many variables, people may become paralysed and avoid the issue altogether. 

These three things which prevent us from acting are all quite powerful, but are implicit, meaning that we don't realise the impact they are having on us. This makes it hard for people to identify or articulate them.

Thinking about career decisions in the light of these three 'inertia mechanisms', it becomes quite clear why career inaction is so common: 

1) career decisions almost always have an uncertain outcome - you don't ever really know what the new job is going to be like until you actually do it - so that contributes to fear and anxiety

2) career choices very often involve short term losses - giving up a stable, familiar, known-quantity, and sometimes an income and a secure future, for the possibility of a better future, some way down the line.

3) Career decisions are complex and uncertain and there are too many variables and too many options. This all places huge demands on our brains, leading to cognitive overload.

There some situations that make career inaction either more or less likely, and it can be useful to spend some time exploring these factors with your clients.
1) A clearly crystalised desired future. If clients can find out more about the options they are considering, and put some time into visualising a clear positive future, this can lead to less fear and anxiety, and less cognitive overload.
2) Making a small change is easier than making a significant change, so if individuals can either identify a small first step, or reframe their plans to make them feel less major, they may feel that it is a less risky thing to do.
3) A deadline helps. If there is no clear window within which the individual has to make the decision, they are much more likely to believe that something better will come up, and will be less motivated to take advantage of any opportunity. Encouraging a client to set their own deadline for action can be useful.
4) Social norms. People's views about the acceptability of changing direction will be shaped by the norms of behaviour in their social circles. If their friends, family and colleagues are comfortable making changes, the individual will feel that their choice is less risky. A coach could help by encouraging the client to identify people they know who have made changes, and reflect on whether their own views have been unduly influenced by others.

Career coaches can thus have a useful part to play in encouraging action, but they can also have a positive impact when working with clients who have already failed to act. 

People who have let opportunities pass them by through inaction will often spend time thinking back to what might have been. The authors describe this as counterfactual thinking and suggest it can focus on what they could have done (the process) or what they could now be doing (the outcome). 

For some, these counterfactual thoughts can be linked to regret, in which case they can lead to self-blame, low satisfaction, low self-esteem and even poorer physical health. For others, who have managed to find a good story they can tell themselves to explain their behaviour, it can lead to a sense of relief. To help clients deal with a sense of regret, coaches can encourage them to understand why they made the choices they did, and help them to forgive themselves. 

The authors also noted that career inaction can easily lead to what they call inaction inertia: having refused to strive for one career opportunity, people seem less inclined to strive for another. The reason for this is that it's more difficult to convince ourselves that ignoring the first possible opportunity was a good idea, if we subsequently make the decision that we want to pursue to second opportunity. Career coaching can help clients unpick these complicated subconscious reactions and can free people up to make better choices in future. 

That's my brief summary of the theory. I think it's really interesting and gives us some useful ideas to help us identify what's going on with our clients, and some practical ways in which we can help. 

Verbruggen, M., & De Vos, A. (2020). When people don’t realize their career desires: toward a theory of career inaction. Academy of Management Review, 45(2), 376-394.

Does career coaching work? A look at the empirical evidence.

Career coaching is a bit fuzzy and ill-defined. It's been around as a term for some time in practice, both within the career development world, as an alternative or adjunct to career guidance or careers advice, and as a specialism within coaching. But the empirical evidence base to offer support for its effectiveness is sorely lacking. 

Just to clarify what career coaching is, my definition (Yates, 2013) suggests that it can take place in a one to one or a group context, that it is underpinned by a non-directive, non-judgemental, humanist philosophy, and that it draws on the practice or understanding of theories, models and approaches from the fields of both coaching psychology and career development. 

Career coaches looking to feel confident about the empirical evidence base behind their work, can take comfort in the evidence base underpinning coaching (see my earlier blog post for an overview: https://coachingincareers.blogspot.com/2018/03/) and career guidance (see Everitt et al., 2018 a review). But if you are looking for evidence that explores career coaching specifically, there is much less to draw from. 

The last few years can offer a few examples of studies that show the positive impact of career coaching. 

Evidence suggests that career coaching leads to higher psychological capital (Archer & Yates, 2017); reconciling work and life roles with values and needs (Brown & Yates, 2018); reduced career ambivalence (Klonek et al., 2016) (through MI); career optimism, career security and career goals (Ebner, 2019); and career optimism, and career planning (Spurk et al., 2015). It also leads to enhanced job search performance (Lim, Oh, Ju & Kim, 2019).

Group coaching has been shown to have a positive impact on career decision making self-efficacy, career planning and career decidedness with German adolescents (Jordan, Gessnitzer & Kauffield, 2016).

Some studies have also looked at career coaching within organisations, finding that the career coaching itself improves staff retention (Dugas, 2018) and job satisfaction (Fassiotto et al., 2018) and also that even having a policy that includes an offer of career coaching is linked to improved institutional satisfaction (Ling, Ning, Change & Zhang, 2018).

These papers provide an interesting starting point but we really need much more - qualitative exploratory studies, and quantitative studies to offer broader generalisations. 

References

Archer, S., & Yates, J. (2017). Understanding potential career changers’ experience of career confidence following a positive psychology based coaching programme. Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, 10(2), 157-175.

Brown, C., & Yates, J. (2018). Understanding the experience of midlife women taking part in a work-life balance career coaching programme: An interpretative phenomenological analysis. International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring, 16(1), 110.

Dugas, Jerelyn, "Career Coaching: A Study of Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Leaders'" (2018). Dissertations. 210. https://digitalcommons.brandman.edu/edd_dissertations/210

Ebner, K. (2019). Promoting career optimism and career security during career coaching: development and test of a model. Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, 1-19.

Fassiotto, M., Simard, C., Sandborg, C., Valantine, H., & Raymond, J. (2018). An Integrated Career Coaching and Time-Banking System Promoting Flexibility, Wellness, and Success: A Pilot Program at Stanford University School of Medicine. Academic Medicine (Ovid), 93(6), 881–887.

Jordan, S., Gessnitzer, S., & Kauffeld, S. (2016). Effects of a group coaching for the vocational orientation of secondary school pupils. Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, 9(2), 143-157.

Klonek, F. E., Wunderlich, E., Spurk, D., & Kauffeld, S. (2016). Career counseling meets motivational interviewing: A sequential analysis of dynamic counselor–client interactions. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 94, 28-38.

Lim, D. H., Oh, E., Ju, B., & Kim, H. N. (2019). Mediating role of career coaching on job-search behavior of older generations. The International Journal of Aging and Human Development, 88(1), 82-104. doi:10.1177/0091415017743009

Ling, F. Y. Y., Ning, Y., Chang, Y. H., & Zhang, Z. (2018). Human resource management practices to improve project managers’ job satisfaction. Engineering Construction & Architectural Management, 25(5), 654–669.


Spurk, D., Kauffeld, S., Barthauer, L., & Heinemann, N. S. R. (2015). Fostering networking behavior, career planning and optimism, and subjective career success: An intervention study. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 87(1), 134–144.

What makes a good day at work?

There has been considerable interest in the literature in happiness in the workplace. We already know quite a bit about what makes one person happier than another, but we have very little understanding of what researchers call 'episodic happiness': what makes one day (or one episode) better than another. This is potentially a really useful area to explore. The factors that make one person happier than another at work are generally fairly stable, and a high level of job satisfaction is down, in large part, to the characteristics of the individual - there are simply some people who enjoy work more than others. Whilst this is of course interesting, it's not very useful, because there isn't much we can do about it. An exploration of what makes one day better than another, however, puts the spotlight on the external factors - the things we might be able to change. If we can find some common themes, then this could be a great starting point for organisations trying to improve the work-experiences of their employees. 

A couple of years ago one of our students, Natasha, conducted a study into what makes a good day at work. It was this that piqued my interest in the topic, and this year the whole cohort of students helped me to collect some qualitative data exploring this topic. The students interviewed 40 adults, currently working in the UK about their jobs, and asked each of them to describe two different good days at work and reflect on what made them so good. 

The analysis of the data revealed three key findings. Good days involve i) making positive contributions,ii)  having positive relationships, and iii) a boost to self-esteem. 

Positive Contribution: what I do
A positive contribution is focused on the content of the participants' work, and at its best, involved people working hard and achieving a lot of useful stuff. This was the most dominant of all the themes and could be seen in every single narrative.

Central to a positive contribution usually was a tangible achievement, as people really enjoyed seeing the fruits of their labour or making clear progress towards a goal. These achievements tended to be particularly satisfying if the project was hard, beset with challenges, daunting or if the success was unexpected. It's interesting to see that (almost) the worse the project is, the more people gain from finishing it. 

People also found their work more rewarding if they could see its value - either working on projects that they believe are important, or through seeing that their work had a positive impact on others. The last feature of 'a positive contribution was feeling productive. The good days identified by the participants were often described as long, tiring or busy days, and people said that feeling worn out at the end of a day made them feel they had been productive. This was also seen in the number of people who spoke about the satisfaction they got from being able to cross things off their to-do lists. 

Positive Relationships: who I am with
It will come as no surprise to hear that other people featured prominently in people's good days. 
Participants enjoyed the opportunity to connect with others, both catching up with colleagues and making connections with new people. As well as social relationships, people reported enjoying collaborating with colleagues, working together on projects, or just being with others who shared the same values, mindset or goals. Finally, the idea of support came up frequently in the narratives: people's good days often included either feeling supported by others, or having the opportunity to support others. 

Positive Self-Evaluations: how I feel about myself
Two thirds of the participants' good days involved an incident that boosted their self-esteem. This theme never appeared on its own in the narratives - it seems that on its own, a boost to self-esteem isn't enough to make a good day, but it is much appreciated alongside another positive incident. Sometimes, these were moments when they realised that they were learning things, were actually pretty good at the job, or had achieved something quite tricky. More often, these moments were linked to feedback from others. Feedback was appreciated from every quarter, with participants quoting positive feedback from co-workers, clients, patients, pupils and their parents. But most impact came from being praised (particularly publicly)  by their managers. In fact, even just being noticed by managers seemed to give participants a positive boost. 

So what can we take from this?

• Managers should feel ok keeping staff busy. People enjoy working hard, so giving people extra work (within reason!) is not necessarily a bad thing. Taking on difficult or daunting tasks reap particular rewards, so should not be avoided. 
• A detailed to-do list, and an opportunity at the end of the day to tick things off and reflect on everything we have achieved might well help us to feel more productive.
• In terms of relationships, there are good things to be gained from social connections, so we should all be making time to talk to our colleagues (or clients, or students, or stakeholders) about non-work things. Managers should encourage this kind of informal interaction and support workers developing personal relationships with each other. 
• Finding ways to boost our own or others' self-esteem is important. Obviously giving workers the training and support they need will make sure that they are more likely to learn, develop their skills and expertise, and succeed in their projects. But on top of this, a culture of praise and specifically public praise can be a great way to offer extra ego-boosts to staff. Senior managers can help substantially here, as praise from them carries particular weight, and managers should remember that even just attention and engagement with their staff can make a huge difference. But it's everyone's job to help with this - giving positive feedback to anyone, whenever we can is going to help. 

And what's next?

There are lots of theories which try to account for well-being more broadly, although they haven't generally been used to help us understand episodic happiness. One of the most well-known is Seligman's PERMA model (2011) which suggests that well-being is made up of: 
Positive emotions - that's probably most similar to self-esteem in this study
Engagement - this wasn't really explicit in this study, although perhaps is linked to productivity
Relationships  - as above
Meaning - that emerged as part of 'making a contribution'
Accomplishment - closely linked to the 'positive contributions' from this study. 

So, this study does a good job of showing that Seligman's model might apply to one-off episodes at work as well as broader life experiences, but as a qualitative study, we can't be sure that we can generalise this to a wider range of people. Perhaps that should be my next study?

What kind of shoes does a social worker wear? And does it matter?

I’ve just had a paper published which describes some research about prototypical social identities – the image that we conjure up in our minds’ eyes when we think about a ‘typical’ member of a particular profession.

As a society, we have become quite wary of stereotypes. We know that they can be inaccurate and can foster discrimination and so we try to eradicate them. But actually, stereotypes are a very natural and normal part of human cognition. Our brains have developed all sorts of mechanisms to maximise the amount of information they can process, and minimise the amount of effort this takes. Stereotypes are one such mechanism and whilst it is clearly wrong to set too much store by them, it’s important to recognise that they are inevitable, and therefore I think we need to learn a bit more about them.

The study

I gathered some students together for some focus groups (24 psychology undergraduates in four focus groups) and asked them to close their eyes and imagine a typical member of four different professions: primary teacher, organisational psychologist, clinical psychologist and social worker. I then asked me to describe these prototypes. Their stories were fascinating.

The first surprising thing was the amount of detail my participants were able to give me. I was keen to push them to see how far they could go with their descriptions. Although they were a bit slow to start, once they got warmed up, they were able to give me all sorts of details about their prototypical characters. They told me what their prototypes looked like, what they wore, what their homes were like, how they spent their holidays, their weekends, their money, who they were living with, what their children were like, what they ate, what they drank, etc etc etc.. I pushed them hard but they met me step for step, and I couldn’t find a question they weren’t able to answer. How amazing to think that they all had this wealth of data about these professions, lurking in the back of their minds!

The second strange thing was that they seemed much more fluent when talking about their imagined prototypes outside work, than in work. A couple of them voiced concerns at the start about their lack of knowledge about the jobs – they said that they didn’t know what an organisational psychologist was, so weren’t sure that they would be able to contribute to the discussions. I told them not to worry, but just to close their eyes and see what came up. And despite not knowing any details about the job itself, they were able to tell me that their imagined organisational psychologist lived in Clapham, had a golden retriever, enjoyed skiing, lived with someone who worked in finance and liked a cocktail bar. It was intriguing to me that these personal stories could be so vivid, when the knowledge of the job itself was so shaky.

The prototypes described seemed to be based on a mix of societal stereotypes and personal experiences. There were clearly some characteristics that the participants’ images of the different professions had in common: the clinical psychologists were intelligent and a bit quirky; the social workers were warm, had clear left-wing values, and lived in slightly shabby homes, and they wore comfortable shoes - this came up surprisingly often. These aspects felt like socially-shared stereotypes, shared by many of the participants and probably influenced by things that we all have access to - the media, fictional characters from tv, films and books, and cultural stereotypes. But the participants’ also described some particular characteristics which seemed specific to them and were based on their own individual experiences – some spoke about primary teachers they remembered from their school days, and psychologists they themselves had met, and they clearly drew on their own experiences when imagining their prototypical professionals.

One final interesting thing was that the particular features of the prototypes described seemed to be clearly linked to personality characteristics. The comfortable shoes, slightly shabby sofas and hearty casseroles of the social workers all seemed to conjure up a warm personality. The colourful accessories and off-the-beaten-track holidays of the clinical psychologists sounded quirky. The dungarees, the karaoke and the comedy tv programmes illustrated the primary teachers’ playful nature.

So why do we care?

It seemed then that the participants had a vast wealth of knowledge about each of these professions, hidden slightly below their consciousness: they didn’t always know that they had this knowledge, but with a few questions and just a little bit of focused attention, they were easily able to bring it to the forefront of their minds. I think it’s inevitable that this information will have an impact on their career choices. How could it not? If they think of themselves as a warm person, they are bound to be more drawn to a profession whose prototype they see as warm. If they like the idea of being seen as a playful person, they are going to be more enthusiastic about choosing a profession they associate with this characteristic.

The career guidance profession is rightly concerned that people should be making their career choices on the basis of up to date, accurate and relevant careers information. Of course this is important. But if people are using their own prototypical ideas to inform their opinions, then we need to be aware of that, so that we can draw this information out, and get them to scrutinise it. If they can identify their own preconceptions, work out where their ideas have come from, and consider whether the information is accurate or relevant, then we can help them to base their decisions on the right kind of information. If we ignore the fact that our clients have a vast array of existing information then we are allowing it to influence their choices, regardless of whether it is accurate, up to date or relevant.

My suggestions might lead to some unusual career conversations, which could touch on some topics that have traditionally been outside the typical carer guidance remit. But that’s no reason to avoid them. If it helps clients to explore their ideas fully, then surely it’s worth a try?

The paper

Yates, J. & Cahill, S. (2019). The characteristics of prototypical occupational identities: a grounded theory of four occupations. British Journal of Guidance and Counselling. Online first. 10.1080/03069885.2019.1706154