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Emerging adult women are actively engaged in career and family explorations, amidst changing opportunities and constraints. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether such women felt they could balance a high-achieving career and a family life, or what has become known in the popular discourse as women “having it all.”

This qualitative study utilized focus groups to explore subjective perceptions of balancing career and family held by emerging adult women. The sample (n=69) comprised female university students in a large Canadian metropolitan area.

Thematic analyses unearthed six distinct yet overlapping positions on the possibility of balancing career and family: Optimism (“I can have it all.”), Pessimism (“I cannot have it all.”), Uncertainty (“I am not sure I can have it all.”), Choice (“I don’t want to have it all.”), Pragmatism (“This is what I need to do to have it all.”) and Support (“Will I access the support necessary to have it all?”).

Limitations include the potential of focus groups to elicit group polarization and to lead participants to censor opinions to conform to conversations. Still, the study reveals more nuanced positions held by women than reported earlier.

The study extends prior research by revealing the range of positions held by women toward career and family, highlighting women’s understanding of the complex issues involved and showcasing their awareness of the crucial role of social support.

Recent research has found that a technique called feedforward interviewing (FFI) can be used to develop employees on the job. Currently the mechanisms and boundary conditions of the FFI-performance relationship are unexplored. Using a positive psychology framework, the purpose of this paper is to discuss how FFI supports the creation of personal and relational resources, and explores the contextual and environmental limits to the effectiveness of the technique.

Through a review of the literature as well as examination through appropriate theoretical lenses, moderators of FFI are proposed and the implications for the effectiveness of the technique are examined.

The FFI model explored in this paper is rooted in broaden and build theory as well as other theories from the positive psychology literature. Design recommendations and future research directions are discussed.

Through a scholarly review of the literature, the potential for the effective use of a new developmental technique is explored. Direct guidance on how to apply FFI in organizations is given.

As workplaces and relationships evolve with increasing complexity, co-worker dynamics have become a key concern for HR managers and scholars. An important yet overlooked aspect of co-worker dynamics is gratitude. This paper adopts a relationship-specific conceptualization of gratitude and explores its influence on prosocial behaviors within co-worker dyads. The proposed model also suggests structural-relational factors under which these relationships are affected.

The conceptual paper draws insights from personal relationships to consider an alternative side of gratitude’s prosocial action tendencies, thereby highlighting two: risk-oriented and opportunity-oriented. These assumptions are then situated within the affect theory of social exchange to predict gratitude’s influence on prosocial behaviors within co-worker dyads.

The proposed model illuminates the importance of studying relationship-specific gratitude within co-worker relations by illustrating its effects on two types of prosocial action tendencies – opportunity-oriented and risk-oriented and varying prosocial behaviors (from convergent to divergent). Structural-relational factors, such as positional and physical distance between co-workers, are considered to affect these relationships.

While the study of gratitude in the workplace is emerging, little research has examined its influence on the nature of prosocial behaviors within co-worker relations. This paper advances the notion that gratitude serves an adaptive function in co-worker dyads, thereby highlighting the risk-oriented and opportunity-oriented continuum, and its implications for the type and scope of prosocial behaviors exchanged.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of trait gratitude on job search behaviour (preparatory and active) for job seekers approaching graduation. The mediating role of perceived employability is examined.

Data were collected from job seekers (n = 143) in their final month of study in two waves with a one-month time lag between first and second data collection.

Structural equation modelling analyses revealed that trait gratitude was significantly and positively associated with perceived employability. Perceived employability mediated the relationship between trait gratitude and preparatory job search, but not active job search.

This study extends research on job search by highlighting the applicability of trait gratitude to the job search process.

Career counsellors should consider trait gratitude as relevant for program development to address the self-regulation of personal resources during job search.

This study is the first step towards connecting trait gratitude to the job search literature. The study identifies trait gratitude as a distal personal resource important for self-regulation of a proximal personal resource (i.e. perceived employability) and subsequent job search behaviour.

As competitive pressures persist and global economic influences continue to present new challenges, businesses need to be able to respond to emerging circumstances. Goal-setting and planning are key mechanisms contributing to organizational competitive success, yet organizations underappreciate the role of competency and capacity building factors that contribute to successful planning. This paper integrates three theoretical models enabling an investigation into the positive relationships between managerial activities generating information feedback, training in planning and skills and organizational performance outcomes, while exploring the positive mediating roles of goal-setting and planning.

A unique organizational sample of agribusiness producers (n = 499) in Canada is examined. A structural equation path analysis model is used to evaluate the main relationships.

The results suggest that organizations are finding that managerial and training activities should not be considered in isolation, but rather as supports for goal-setting, planning and performance outcomes. Thus, the implications are that managers can find organizational value enhanced through the building of human resource competency (e.g. management activities and training) with these emerging capacities aiding goal setting and planning activities.

This study makes three main contributions: first, by adopting a rational-design perspective and integrating theoretical frameworks focusing on (a) planning-performance and (b) goal-setting-planning. This extended model goes beyond previous studies by including managerial activities, training, goals, planning and performance outcomes. Second, this study uniquely accounts for a more comprehensive set of key confounding factors such as operational activities, organizational strategy and organizational size in the integrated framework. Finally, as far as the authors are aware, there has not been a survey study at the organizational level that has explored the role of managerial activities and training in planning within a similarly comprehensive model.

The purpose of this mixed-methods study is to examine the motivational determinants and contextual antecedents of individual job crafting behaviors.

The current research uses the mixed-methods design to elucidate the relationship between career outcome expectations and different forms of job crafting through external regulation. In Study 1, surveys were collected and analyzed from 151 employees across occupations and ranks using purposeful sampling approach. In Study 2, interview data were thematically analyzed to add complementarity and completeness to the findings.

In Study 1 (n = 151), a direct relationship between career outcome expectations and different forms of job crafting was established. Mediation analysis indicated an indirect relationship between career outcome expectations and approach crafting through external-social regulation. The authors found support for the accentuating role of turnover intentions on career outcome expectations and external social and material regulations. In Study 2 (n = 25), a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews confirmed that when employees experience unfulfilled career expectations, employees attempt to realign the work situations. Such expectations may be tied to various forms of work-related external regulations and may lead to job crafting behaviors. The individuals depicted these behaviors while experiencing turnover intentions.

The current study brings together literature from job design, motivation and careers to consider the role of career expectations and external regulation in predicting job crafting behaviors. Taken together, the findings unearth the cognitive and contextual antecedents of job crafting.

While the number of women in managerial positions has been increasing, the gender composition of top management teams is skewed. There are barriers and obstacles in place that limit the movement of women into leadership roles. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between modesty and access to leadership. Specifically, tendencies toward modesty and lack of self‐promotion are hypothesized to perpetuate the lack of female involvement in top management positions.

The literature on modesty and self‐promotion is reviewed. The findings are discussed in terms of the persistent challenges faced by women with regard to their ability to enter senior levels of management.

The overall message of the paper is that behaviours that are successful for males in the workplace are not successful for females. The good news is that women do not need to adopt male ways of being in order to succeed. A limitation is that the paper is largely “uni‐cultural”, as the research referenced is primarily that undertaken in a North American context. Self‐promotion and modesty may be conceptualized differently in other contexts.

The paper is one of the first to focus on modesty, an important gendered individual difference, to explain persistent workplace inequalities.

The aim of the current study is to investigate the effect of training individual group members on the collective efficacy of the group and the group's subsequent performance.

Participants (n=275), in a laboratory study were randomly assigned to groups of five (k=55). Individuals were then randomly selected from those groups such that none, one, three, or all five members of the group participated in training on effective ways to select a job candidate.

Groups in which at least a majority of group members were trained had higher collective efficacy than groups where fewer members were trained. Training individuals beyond a majority did not improve collective efficacy further. Collective efficacy mediated the relationship between individual training and group level performance.

This research extends the knowledge of the relationship between the individual and the group within social cognitive theory. Training a majority of the group is needed to see an increase in collective efficacy, a mediator of group performance.

Human resource managers should consider the effects of training individuals when they expect their employees to work as teams. It is beneficial to train as many people as necessary for the group to be able to benefit from the new information; however, training beyond the majority of people within the group does not improve confidence or performance.

The paper examines the relationship between individual group members and collective efficacy in a learning context. This extends the knowledge of social cognitive theory by crossing levels of analysis.

The purpose of this study was to examine inter‐rater agreement on counterproductive performance between self‐ and peer‐ratings, and the factors that moderate this agreement. The factors investigated included self‐reported levels of counterproductive performance and known antecedents of counterproductive performance: conscientiousness and integrity values.

Data were gathered (three to five peer ratings per individual) from 108 undergraduate students.

The paper finds that there was a significantly low correlation between self‐ and peer‐ ratings of counterproductive performance. Ratings given by peers were much higher than ratings given by oneself. Individuals and peers who are similar in the extent to which they engage in counterproductive behaviors were in agreement with respect to ratings of counterproductive performance.

This study provided evidence that rater disagreement is a consistent phenomenon across dimensions of performance. In addition, rater perceptions of counterproductive performance have a significant impact on overall performance ratings; therefore individual differences between the rater and ratee may have a large influence on overall ratings in an organizational setting. There is some evidence in this study that peer ratings of counterproductive behavior vary depending on the rater's own counterproductive behaviors. The fact that rater agreement is influenced by the rater's own behavior implies that individual rater effects are influencing counterproductive performance measurement.

This study adds value by extending the literature on inter‐rater agreement to counterproductive performance. In addition, this study is unique in that it shows that a rater's own level of counterproductive performance can impact their ratings of others.