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.