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This article aims to provide prospective authors guidelines that will hopefully enable them to submit more competitive manuscripts to journals publishing careers research.

Based on their experience as an author, reviewer and editorial team member, the authors identify the main criteria that a quantitative study must meet to be considered for publication in international peer-reviewed journals covering career-related topics. They emphasize the importance of contributing to the careers literature and of designing the study in accordance with the research question.

Manuscripts are rejected because they are insufficiently innovative, and/or because sample, instruments and design are not appropriate to answer the research question at hand. Cross-sectional designs cannot be used to answer questions of mediation but should not be discarded automatically since they can be used to address other types of questions, including questions about nesting, clustering of individuals into subgroups, and to some extent, even causality.

The manuscript provides an insight into the decision-making process of reviewers and editorial board members and includes recommendations on the use of cross-sectional data.

This research sought to examine the potential association between workers’ financial worry and counterproductive work behavior. Based on the basic psychological need theory, we propose that psychological need satisfaction explains this relationship and we position this volitional pathway as an alternative to a cognitive capacity pathway based on the cognitive load theory.

We conducted a two-week interval-lagged survey study with three measurement points among 180 US workers. The mediation models were tested using structural equation modeling.

The results support the conclusion that, while cognitive capacity could have an impact on counterproductive work behavior, its mediating effect is less strong than that of need satisfaction.

Based on the results, we recommend that organizations design their compensation and benefits system to shield employees from financial worries. At the same time, we advise offering the employees who do experience financial worries assistance in managing their budgets and offering other forms of financial coaching.

This study is innovative because we show that the negative effects of financial worry extend much further than initially thought and affect not only employees' cognition but also their motivation.

The purpose of this study was to test the mediating role of relative deprivation in the relationship between perceived overqualification and counterproductive work behavior. In addition to testing this mediation, the authors posited that ambition would interact with perceived overqualification to predict relative deprivation and, through it, counterproductive work behavior.

Survey data collected from 181 employees were analyzed using the SPSS macro PROCESS to test the proposed moderated mediation model.

Results indicated that perceived overqualification positively associated with perceptions of relative deprivation, which were, in turn, positively related to counterproductive work behavior. This indirect relationship gained in strength with increasing levels of ambition.

By modeling and measuring relative deprivation, this study offers a direct test of the often-invoked relative deprivation explanation of the implications of perceived overqualification for counterproductive work behavior. The study also shows how ambition can have unintended consequences.

The purpose of this paper is to test whether managers’ political skill is relevant for employees’ authentic leadership perceptions. Political influence theory assumes that political tactics seek to affect others’ interpretations of a person or situation. Thus, what matters for employees’ perceptions of their manager’s authentic leadership may be whether the manager actively seeks to show behavior that can be interpreted as authentic leadership. Combining political influence theory and gender stereotypes research, it is further suggested that manager gender moderates the employees’ interpretation of political influence attempts that are ambiguous.

Managers (n=156; 49.5 percent female) completed measures of their political skill. Employees (n=427; 39.1 percent female) completed measures of the manager’s authentic leadership.

Managers’ apparent sincerity was positively related to employees’ perceptions of managers’ authentic leadership; managers’ networking ability was negatively related to employees’ perceptions of female managers’ authentic leadership, but not of male managers.

The methodology does not allow claims about causality.

Findings add knowledge of authentic leadership, such as difficulties that female managers face, and show the value of a fine-grained approach to political skill. Female managers should be aware that networking might have disadvantageous side effects. Conversely, sincere behavior attempts seem favorable for authentic leadership perceptions.

Though the recent conceptualization of career sustainability, defining its indicators and dimensions prompted an important field of careers research, empirical research is still in its infancy. The current study empirically investigates how proactive personality, career adaptability and proactive career behaviors promote career sustainability based on the career construction model of adaptation.

The authors used a two-wave survey design to collect data from 414 full-time working professionals representing different organizations located in India. The authors tested the proposed hypotheses using structural equation modeling in IBM SPSS AMOS.

Results supported a serial indirect effect model with career adaptability and proactive career behaviors carrying the effect of proactive personality on career sustainability.

The study contributes to the emerging sustainable careers literature by unveiling the role of individual factors in career sustainability. Furthermore, the authors investigated these relationships through the complete career construction model of adaptation. By doing so, the current study contributes to careers literature by revealing the linkage between the career construction model of adaptation and career sustainability.

Mass lay-offs tremendously impact employees and companies. Helping people toward new employment could help organizations manage costs and reputation. The authors sought to test a model, based on regulatory focus theory, predicting which employees are more likely to consider leaving the company during this uncertain time (turnover intentions) and indirectly to engage in behavior to strengthen their external labor market position (mobility-oriented behavior).

With a mass lay-off impending, the authors studied employees (N = 326) in a financial services organization. The authors reasoned that employees' perception that they have higher (vs lower) qualifications than their job requires, may be able to spur turnover intentions for some because it enhances perception that movement to another job is desirable and feasible. The authors proposed perceptions of being overqualified vs perceptions of being underqualified only affect the turnover intentions and mobility-oriented behavior of promotion-focused employees.

Supporting the expectations, promotion-focused employees (but not prevention-focused employees) who perceived themselves to be overqualified, compared with promotion-focused employees who perceived themselves to be underqualified, showed higher turnover intentions and, indirectly, mobility-oriented behavior.

This research is one of few studies that have examined intentions and behavior of employees who are facing impending mass lay-off, as most lay-off research has studied survivors or victims post lay-off. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to apply a regulatory focus perspective on overqualification/underqualification, as well as to turnover intention and mobility behavior.

Mental health issues negatively affect employees’ quality of life and employers’ bottom line. Consequently, ensuring well-being in the workplace is becoming a high priority from a strategic human resource management perspective. Drawing on basic psychological needs theory, we propose that proactive personality will be related to mental well-being through satisfaction of basic psychological needs. In addition, drawing on the trait-by-trait interactions perspective, we expect the mediated relationship to be moderated by conscientiousness.

We tested our research model using data collected from 185 employees using a three-wave time-lagged design.

Proactive personality related to mental well-being indirectly, via psychological need satisfaction, and this indirect relationship was stronger at higher levels of conscientiousness.

Ensuring mental well-being of employees is critical to achieving a competitive advantage. Support for the mediating role of need satisfaction suggests that organizations can tailor interventions aimed at influencing the more malleable mediating variable, psychological need satisfaction, compared to relatively stable personality traits.

We contribute to theory by testing a theoretical explanation for how and why personality affects mental well-being. Another theoretical contribution is demonstrating that mental well-being results from a combination of personality traits, with a trait-by-trait perspective fitting the data better than an unconditional trait model.

To enhance the understanding of the mechanisms underlying the effects of incivility on outcomes, the purpose of this paper is to propose and test work engagement as a mediator of the impact of supervisor-initiated incivility on subordinates’ task and citizenship performance. Further, the authors propose that this mediated relationship would be conditional on the influence of trust in supervisor, such that the relationship would be exacerbated for subordinates who have high levels of trust in the supervisor.

Data came from a cross-sectional survey of 350 professionals employed in diverse occupations and organization types.

The authors found support for the mediating role of work engagement for citizenship performance, but not for task performance. As predicted, this explanation only held for employees who reported at least average levels of trust in their supervisors, supporting the “mediation is moderated” explanation.

Understanding how and for whom supervisor incivility affects task and citizenship performance is vital to advancing theory as well as for designing interventions to mitigate the negative effects. This manuscript is one of very few to pursue this line of research and makes important contributions to theory and practice.

In spite of the recent meta-analysis by Martin et al. (2016), we have very little insight about the theoretical mechanism explaining the leader–member exchange–counterproductive work behavior (LMX–CWB) relationship. Drawing on social cognitive theory, the purpose of this paper is to test if occupational self-efficacy functions as a mediating mechanism to explain the relationship between LMX quality and counterproductive performance directed toward the supervisor. In addition, based on the conservation of resources theory, the paper investigates if supervisor–subordinate relationship tenure acted as a second-stage moderator of this mediated relationship.

The authors used two-wave time-lagged data from a sample of 189 high-tech professionals to test the hypotheses, controlling for age, sex, and trust.

The results of this paper showed that occupational self-efficacy carried the effect of LMX quality on counterproductive performance, but only for workers who have longer supervisor–subordinate relationship tenure.

This paper is unique in proposing and testing a social cognitive mechanism to explain the relationship between LMX quality and counterproductive performance. As Johns (2017) advocated, the authors incorporated length of time, a contextual variable into this study by investigating supervisor–subordinate relationship tenure as moderating the proposed mediated relationship.