Calling and work-related outcomes: Career commitment as a mediator
Section snippets
Research on work as a calling
The literature on measuring and assessing perceptions of work as a calling is limited, but growing, with vocational psychologists mainly studying the role of calling among adolescent and young adult populations and I/O psychologists and management researchers studying the role of calling among adult populations and in the workplace. Two early studies by Davidson and Caddell, 1994, Wrzesniewski et al., 1997 surveyed working adults representing diverse occupations and asked them to read three
Broader context and related constructs
We conceptualize a calling as defined in the manner proposed by Dik and Duffy (2009), namely as a sense in which (a) one feels called by some external, beyond-the-self force, to a particular career in a manner that (b) is a source or expression of one's broader sense of meaning and purpose in life, and that (c) views the needs or benefits of others as a motivating force. Clearly, components of this definition overlap with previously established areas of research. At a global level, research on
Calling and commitment: a mediated model
Despite the consistent pattern of results in which calling and related constructs correlate positively with beneficial work-related and mental health criterion variables, little is known about the mechanisms underlying these relations. One possible mediator of the relation between calling and work outcomes is career commitment. Research has demonstrated a strong link between calling and commitment to one's current, or future, career (e.g., Bunderson and Thompson, 2009, Duffy and Sedlacek, 2007,
Participants
The sample consisted of 370 employees recruited from a large Western research university. Participants reported a mean age of 44.6 years (SD = 11.2 years); mostly self-identified as women (69.7%) and White/European-American (90.0%; Hispanic American = 6.5%, Indigenous American = 1.4%, Asian/Pacific Island American = 1.4%, Black/African American = 0.5%, and Other = 3.0%). Participants were highly educated, reporting a mean of 9.4 years of education past 8th grade (SD = 3.1), and were fairly affluent, reporting a
Results
Descriptive statistics for the five variables examined in the current study are displayed in Table 1. All variables were analyzed for skewness and kurtosis, and only job satisfaction showed skewness levels over 1 (− 1.10). Given this relatively low level of negative skew, we decided to examine the interrelations among all of the variables in their original scale form. As seen in Table 1, calling moderately correlated with job satisfaction, career commitment, and organizational commitment, and
Model 1
First, we tested a fully mediated model – Model 1, depicted in Fig. 1 – to identify significant indirect paths. Unique error terms for each endogenous variable are included in the model (e.g., “eCC” refers to measurement error for the career commitment measure). Because organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and withdrawal intentions are significantly correlated, their error terms are allowed to correlate in each model. Consistent with recommendations for using SEM, we specified another
Model 2
Second, we added all three direct paths from calling to organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and withdrawal intentions, allowing us to test whether indirect paths remained significant even when parallel, direct paths were specifically modeled.
Final model
Third, we eliminated any non-significant paths from Model 2 in order to maximize the goodness-of-fit of the model to the data—resulting in Model 3, depicted in Fig. 2. By including the best-fitting combinations of significant direct and indirect paths, it is possible to determine from this final model whether career commitment fully or partially mediates any of the relations of calling with work-related criterion variables.
To evaluate the fit of the models, we used a combination of indices
Model 1
First, we tested the model portrayed in Fig. 1. The fit was acceptable according to the CFI and SRMR indices, but not TLI and RMSEA (Χ2 (df = 3) = 26.00, p < .001; CFI = .97; TLI = .91; SRMR = .05; RMSEA = .15, 90% C.I. = .10–.21). All of the path coefficients portrayed in Fig. 1 are significant at p < .001. Of note, all of the indirect paths were significant at p < .001, as well. Thus, there is initial evidence that career commitment plays some meditational role between calling and all three variables. In
Discussion
The results of the current study provide evidence concerning the linkages between the sense of a calling and workplace outcomes and, perhaps more importantly, one mechanism to explain these links. Several previous studies have found that calling relates favorably to work satisfaction and commitment (Bunderson and Thompson, 2009, Davidson and Caddell, 1994, Peterson et al., 2009, Wrzesniewski et al., 1997), and the correlations from the current study supported this prior research. Individuals
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