The other side of the coin: Vocational interests, interest differentiation and annual income at the occupation level of analysis

Assessing Interests in the Twenty-First-Century Workforce: Building on a Century of Interest Measurement

Recent research has re-emphasized the importance of vocational interests for understanding workplace attitudes and behavior. As a result, there is a renewed interest in the assessment of vocational interests in organizations. Numerous interest assessments have been developed over the past century, and they are now administered to millions of people throughout the world. Nevertheless, there is still work to be done, particularly as interest assessments are increasingly being used in organizational settings. This article reviews developments in interest assessments and discusses the implications of their use for both research and practice. It discusses the advantages and disadvantages of examining vocational interests in organizational contexts and proposes future research directions.

Toward Reviving an Occupation with Occupations

The notion of occupation has long played a vital role in understanding the psychology of individual behavior, choice, perceptions, and attitudes in work contexts. However, the centrality of occupation to research found within the broader organizational psychology and behavior literature has been largely supplanted in favor of a more organization-centric lens. The primary goal of this review is to build a case for renewing direct efforts to more meaningfully integrate occupation into organizational psychology and behavior scholarship. In doing so, this review outlines what it means, and why it matters, to once again take occupations more seriously in our theory and research. I discuss five essential ways occupations influence important organizational psychology and behavior phenomena and exemplifying evidence from previous research. The review concludes with illustrations of occupationally focused questions that could be investigated across several specific organizational psychology and behavior topics.

A Psychological Description of the Swiss Labor Market from 1991 to 2014

Abstract. This study conducted a representative analysis of the Swiss labor market from 1991 to 2014 by applying Holland’s (1997) classification of occupations according to six vocational interest types: realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, and conventional (RIASEC). Using data from the Swiss Labor Force Survey, we found that, over this period, realistic occupations consistently represented the largest share of jobs, albeit with a declining tendency. Increased numbers of people were employed in social and enterprising types of work. The lowest numbers were found in artistic and investigative occupations. Gender segregation along the six RIASEC occupational types were found on the Swiss labor market as well, with most men working in realistic and most women working in social occupations. Furthermore, we observed large salary differences between the six occupational types, even after controlling for required skill level. In line with findings concerning gender pay inequality, men earned more than women in each RIASEC occupational type in each year. Moreover, we found that RIASEC occupations differed meaningfully with regard to skill level, and that the required skill level increased across all RIASEC occupations over the examined 23-year period.

Political Skill and Manager Performance: Exponential and Asymptotic Relationships Due to Differing Levels of Enterprising Job Demands

Political skill, a social competence that enables individuals to achieve goals due to their understanding of and influence upon others at work, can play an important role in manager performance. We argue that the political skill–manager performance relationship varies as a nonlinear function of differing levels of enterprising job demands (i.e., working with and through people). A large number of occupations have some enterprising features, but, across occupations, management roles typically contain even greater enterprising expectations. However, relatively few studies have examined the enterprising work context (e.g., enterprising demands) of managers. Specifically, under conditions of high enterprising job demands, we argue and find that, as political skill increases, there is an associated exponential increase in enterprising performance, with growth beyond the mean of political skill resulting in outsized performance gains. Whereas, under conditions of low (relative to other managers) enterprising job demands, political skill will have an asymptotic relationship with enterprising job performance, such that the positive relationship becomes weaker as political skill grows, with increases on political skill beyond the mean resulting in minimal performance improvements. Our hypotheses are generally supported, and these findings have important implications for managers, as the performance gains in managerial roles were shown to be a joint function of manager political skill and enterprising job demands.

Age and Gender Differences in the Variability of Vocational Interests

Gender- and age-related differences in the variability of various human attributes and abilities have been investigated. This article investigates the age and gender differences in the variability of Holland’s six vocational dimensions with a sample including 1,519 participants, divided into four age groups: early adolescence (12–15 years old), adolescence (16–20 years old), young adulthood (21–30 years old), and adulthood (31–59 years old). The results showed nontrivial differences in the variability of vocational interests across gender and age groups alike. Although significant differences in variability were observed for all vocational interest dimensions except investigative, the most pronounced differences in variability across age and gender were observed for realistic and conventional dimensions. Generally, the observed differences in variability were larger in adolescence than in adulthood. Overall, vocational interests displayed less differentiation within the younger age groups (early adolescence and early adulthood) as compared to adulthood.

Relationships of Vocational Interest Congruence, Differentiation, and Elevation to Career Preparedness Among University Students

Abstract. Vocational interest characteristics – interest congruence, interest differentiation, and general interest level (elevation) – are useful indicators for career development. However, research on these issues has primarily focused on adolescents in the transition from school to work and analyzed a limited set of career-related correlates. This study extends this line of research by exploring the relationships of interest congruence, interest differentiation, and interest elevation with several indicators of career preparedness (i. e., career planning, occupational self-efficacy beliefs, career decidedness, and career engagement) among a sample of emerging adults during their university studies in Germany. Data from 239 students representing a wide range of majors were collected via an online questionnaire. Controlling for sociodemographic variables, multiple regression analyses revealed that differentiation was positively associated with career decidedness and career engagement and elevation was positively related to occupational self-efficacy beliefs and career engagement. We discuss the findings regarding the importance of differences in vocational interest characteristics for the career preparedness of university students.

New Developments in the Assessment of Vocational Interests and Implications for Research and Practice

Abstract. The assessment and research of vocational interests have a long history in psychology. Our bibliometric analysis shows a steep rise in publication numbers focused on vocational interests immediately after John Holland’s (1959) seminal work and a newly awakened impetus especially in German-speaking countries since the 1990’s. Contemporary research focuses on new structural models of vocational interests and attempts to further consolidate the construct validity of interests by delving deeper into the associations with personality and cognitive abilities. The enormous research activity of the past couple of decades culminated in two meta-analyses on the criterion-related validity of vocational interests, which reveal moderate validities with respect to occupational criteria, yet sophisticated matching algorithms and more detailed interest models raise expectations for a more precise prediction. The studies included in this special issue contribute to this vivid field of research by (1) rethinking the relationship between creative and investigative interests in particular and the Big Five personality traits, (2) analyzing the interlink between secondary vocational interest constructs and several indicators of career preparedness, (3) testing Gottfredson’s developmental theory of occupational aspirations, and (4) investigating the perceived benefits of online self-assessments in an experimental pretest-posttest control group design.