Workforce Readiness and the Future of Work

Fred Oswald, Tara S. Behrend, Lori Foster, Fred Oswald, Tara S. Behrend, Lori Foster

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351210461
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Psicologia
• Categoria: Psicologia applicata

Workforce readiness is an issue that is of great national and societal importance. For the United States and other countries to thrive in a globally interconnected environment of wide-ranging opportunities and threats, the need to develop and maintain a skilled and adaptable workforce is critical. National investments in job training and schools remain essential in stimulating businesses and employment agencies to collaborate productively with educators who provide both training and vocational guidance.

Workforce Readiness and the Future of Work argues that the large-scale multifaceted efforts required to ensure a reliable and strong supply of talent and skill in the U.S. workforce should be addressed systematically, simultaneously, and systemically across disciplines of thought and levels of analysis. In a four-part framework, the authors cover the major areas of:

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• education in the K-12, vocational, postsecondary, and STEM arenas;

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• economic and labor market considerations;

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• employment, organizations, and the world of work;

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• laws, policies, and budgets at the federal, state, local, and military levels.

With contributions from leading scholars, this volume informs high-priority workforce effectiveness issues of current and future concern and concrete research, practice, and policy directions to generate novel insights of a multilevel and system-wide nature.

1
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WORKING AND WORKFORCE READINESS

How to Pursue Decent Work

Richard P. Douglass, Ryan D. Duffy, Jessica W. England, and Nicholas P. Gensmer

Traditional theories within vocational psychology have often prompted people to contemplate what types of jobs fit their personality and then attempt to secure such positions (e.g., Holland, 1959). Embedded in this approach is the idea that people can easily pursue any educational and occupational opportunities that match their desires. Unfortunately, most people are not able to freely choose the kinds of jobs they would like because of various reasons such as discrimination, economic constraints, and a lack of access to opportunities. Emerging frameworks within vocational psychology are beginning to acknowledge this issue by examining the factors that influence a person’s choice of work. One such theory, the Psychology of Working Theory (PWT; Duffy, Blustein, Diemer, & Autin, 2016), attempts to reveal how people can pursue decent work, which is not necessarily work that a person is drawn to, but work that fulfills a person’s basic needs and contributes to a greater sense of well-being. Duffy et al. contend that decent work is a fundamental right that should be available to all people. That is, people who want decent work should be able to attain it without first having to surmount numerous obstacles. This ideal is proposed to contribute not only to the well-being of individuals but also to the growth of society. This chapter explores the PWT and the central construct of decent work. In the following pages, we describe the concept of decent work, examine its antecedents and consequences, and, finally, explore the implications of the PWT and decent work for those either in the workforce or preparing to enter the workforce.

Conceptualizing Decent Work

Before discussing the implications and pursuit of decent work, we will first discuss what exactly comprises the construct. Building from the definition of decent work put forth by the International Labor Organization (ILO, 2008, 2012), Duffy et al. (2016) conceptualize decent work as consisting of five unique factors: (a) access to adequate healthcare, (b) adequate compensation, (c) work hours that allow individuals to have free time and rest, (d) organizational values that are in line with personal and social values, and (e) work environments that promote interpersonal and physical safety. The presence of all five of these factors is thought to represent decent work, but it is possible to only experience some components. An employee, for example, may receive adequate health care and pay but work in an environment in which he or she feels unsafe. Another employee may also receive adequate compensation and health care while working in safe environment but not have time for rest. Although the examples above include some aspects of decent work, it may be helpful to consider what decent work looks like when all facets are present. Imagine going to a job every day where you felt safe interacting with colleagues and superiors; you feel able to voice any concerns you have. You work enough to make a fair wage with benefits that allow you to save for retirement and seek appropriate medical care. However, you don’t feel overworked—you have enough time outside work to participate in hobbies and see family and friends. Lastly, you work somewhere that has the same value system as you, perhaps contributing a large amount of profits to charitable organizations. You may not necessarily love your job, but it helps you to satisfy your basic needs.

From this conceptualization, decent work concerns an employee’s individual experience within the workforce. As such, Duffy et al. (2016) argued that it is ideal to measure decent work using both macro-level indicators (e.g., union density, unemployment ratios) and individual-level indicators (e.g., self-report measures). This view of decent work allows researchers to consider both the macro-level and contextual influences on individuals in the workforce. Regarding measurement, Duffy et al. (2017) developed the Decent Work Scale, which is a continuous measure designed to assess decent work among employed adults. This self-report measure can be used to help those currently in the workforce determine which aspects of decent work are present and provide an idea of what components might be missing. Example items of this measure include “I get good healthcare benefits from my job” and “I feel emotionally safe interacting with people at work.” This measure, coupled with the presented conceptualization of decent work, suggests that it’s best to not consider decent work as a dichotomy of “existing” or “not existing” but instead examine how decent a job might be. In this way, employees can assess the areas that are currently decent and evaluate how lacking areas might be improved.

What’s So Good About Decent Work?

Although we have discussed what decent work is, we have yet to underscore why decent work matters. That’s to say, what’s so good about decent work? According to the PWT (Duffy et al., 2016), there’s quite a bit of good to come from securing decent work in the way of satisfying one’s needs and experiencing general and work-related well-being. For people preparing to enter the workforce—or those who are already employed—attaining decent work is an avenue through which individuals can experience a more fulfilling life, both in and out of the workplace.

Individual Benefits

The PWT theorizes that securing decent work is positively linked with satisfying survival needs, social connection needs, and self-determination needs. Satisfying these needs is then theorized to result in a greater sense of work fulfillment and overall well-being. It is through need satisfaction that decent work contributes to these positive outcomes. Survival needs are defined by having access to essential human needs such as food and shelter. Social connection needs are related to how an individual connects with society broadly. The need for social connection transcends the mere occurrence of interpersonal interactions at work and instead indicates positive and meaningful interactions within one’s community and the feeling that they are contributing to society.

Regarding self-determination needs, one can turn to Self-Determination Theory (SDT; Ryan & Deci, 2000), which contrasts intrinsic with extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is an internal inclination toward exploration and mastery that is ignited by genuine personal interest and enjoyment. When an individual is intrinsically motivated toward a task, simply engaging in that task will be personally rewarding. Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, involves completing a task chiefly for the achievement of some reward that is external to the task itself. For an individual who goes to work solely for a paycheck, the motivation to work is completely extrinsic. However, SDT outlines how extrinsically motivated work can still be self-fulfilling and more internally rewarding when certain needs are met, even if the work is not done out of pure personal enjoyment. These three psychological needs that encompass self-determination are feelings of autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Autonomy refers to an individual’s needs of flexibility and freedom at work. This does not imply complete independence or detachment from others at work, but rather a sense of choice and volition over one’s actions in the workplace. Competence refers to an individual’s perception that their skills are suited to job tasks. Feeling efficacious toward a task allows for greater internalization and feelings of mastery. Finally, relatedness is the feeling of being interpersonally connected with others. In the case of work, this includes not only a feeling of social belongingness but also a sense that one’s work is seen as significant and valuable by others with whom that individual feels attachment toward (Ryan & Deci, 2000).

SDT classifies these three needs as basic psychological needs that are innate, essential, and universal to all people. When satisfied, self-determination needs contribute to a person’s overall well-being by enhancing self-motivation and mental health. Insufficient fulfillment of these needs, however, is theorized to contribute to mental pathology and ill-being in the broader areas of one’s life (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Thus, although some people may not necessarily find their work to be purely intrinsically fulfilling, one’s job or career still offers a way to find meaning and purpose. Meeting self-determination needs in the workplace allows extrinsically motivated activities to be internalized and perceived as self-motivated, which is a profound benefit of decent work (Duffy et al., 2016).

Aside from resulting in greater need satisfaction, decent work is proposed to contribute to greater fulfillment at work and overall well-being. These domains are vast and encompass variables such as meaningful work, enjoyment of work, life satisfaction, and self-esteem (Duffy et al., 2016). The idea is that meeting basic survival needs, feeling connected with society, and experiencing self-determination at work pave the way for beneficial outcomes.

Other Benefits

Beyond benefits to individual employees, the widespread attainment of decent work has the potential to broadly impact communities and organizations. The adequate compensation and health care that is provided by decent work, for instance, can help to alleviate the negative effects of poverty and unemployment on the well-being of entire communities (Ali, 2013; Blustein, Kenny, Di Fabio, & Guichard, in press). In fact, when looking at high-conflict regions throughout the world, unemployment is often associated with civil unrest (ILO, 2018; Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2015). In their review of the global expansion of decent work, Blustein et al. point to global economic development literature suggesting that work may help to foster a sense of security and meaning within individuals and societies (Bhawuk, Carr, Gloss, & Thompson, 2014; McWha-Hermann, Maynard, & O’Neill Berry, 2015). Also related to meaning, when individuals perceive their work to be meaningful—which is theorized to result from decent work—they are more likely to be engaged and productive at work, which is a major benefit to organizations (Grant, 2008). Thus, not only can decent work promote fulfillment and well-being, it can also create greater economic growth, leading to an increase in resources and creating more positions that meet the components of decent work (ILO, 2015). Better jobs provide more income to spend, which can be put into businesses, increasing the number of job positions available and raising pay and job conditions for employees. Further, through the increase in available job positions and the improvement of job conditions, providing decent work increases social equality and promotes social justice across groups of individuals.

In sum, the benefits of securing decent work extend beyond the individual and can impact society as a whole. Blustein et al. (in press) highlight the potential for scholarship surrounding decent work to inform social justice initiatives that help to improve the economic and psychological well-being for individuals and society. Although decent work is viewed as a human right by the ILO (2008), it is clear that providing employees with decent work can help to reduce community health and wealth disparities and promote economic growth.

The Psychology of Working Theory

Now that we’ve discussed what decent work is and why it’s good, it’s important to understand the factors influencing the process of securing decent work.

Past Theories

In an ideal world, a person would reflect on their personal preferences and pick a job that allowed them to enjoy their work while making a decent living. The two most popular theoretical models in the career development literature—Holland’s Theory of Career Choice (Holland, 1959; Nauta, 2010) and Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT; Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994)—primarily focus on personal preferences as drivers of decision-making. In Holland’s theory, the dominant focus is on the determination of an individual’s interests in six main vocational domains (i.e., realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, and conventional) and how these interests match with a particular work environment, otherwise known as person-environment fit. The greater the fit, the more a person is thought to be satisfied with his or her work. SCCT extended Holland’s theory by incorporating self-efficacy (an individual’s performance beliefs around particular behaviors) and outcome expectations (beliefs about what will occur in the future, or outcomes, of performing behaviors) as key drivers in the development of interests, which ultimately are hypothesized to lead to choice goals and actions (Lent et al., 1994; Sheu et al., 2010). The SCCT does conceptually incorporate background contextual influences in its larger model, but this variable has received relatively little empirical research in comparison to self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and interests.

Research supporting each of these theories is robust, particularly as it relates to the role interests play in career choice selection (Nauta, 2010; Sheu et al., 2010). However, the vast majority of research on these theories has been conducted with college students, which is intuitive, because these theories concern predictors of choice, and students are a population where an array of career choices is available and highly salient. However, for the vast majority of adults, other factors apart from self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and interests play critical roles in their career trajectory. The PWT (Duffy et al., 2016) is focused on this population, individuals who do not come from high levels of privilege or status and are making career decisions in the real world (Blustein, 2006, 2013). As such, the PWT positions contextual factors related to economic and social issues as the primary drivers of securing decent work.

The Role of Context

According to the PWT, individuals are agents in their life and are also subject to a number of outside forces. From birth, individuals are agents in their life yet are also obviously subject to a number of outside forces. Within the PWT, two variables are considered to be key contextual influences on a person’s life: experiences of marginalization and economic constraints. The PWT acknowledges that people experience marginalization for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, and ability status. In fact, people often experience multiple forms of marginalization based on the intersection of multiple non-majority identities (Cole, 2009). Additionally, people who experience frequent forms of marginalization are also inclined to experience economic constraints, or limitations surrounding economic resources. In tandem, these variables are theorized to directly impede an individual’s pursuit of decent work through an overarching lack of access to opportunity.

The ways in which marginalization and economic constraints directly impact decent work can be seen across various marginalized groups within the United States. Racial and ethnic minorities, for example, still receive significantly fewer job callbacks when compared with White individuals (Quillian, Pager, Hexal, & Midtbøen, 2017). Specifically, Quillian et al. found that Whites currently field about 15% more callbacks compared with Latinas/os and 36% more callbacks than African Americans. Similarly related, over the past 18 years within the United States, African American men have experienced between 11% and 15% greater unemployment rates than White men (Hout, 2017). These disparities in relation to employment opportunities among racial and ethnic minorities in the United States are likely related to the long-standing elevated rates of poverty among this group in comparison to White Americans (Burton, Mattingly, Pedroza, & Welsh, 2017). Disparities in employment have translated to disparities in median accumulated family wealth in the United States as well, as African American and Hispanic families have been found to have only eight and ten cents of wealth, respectively, per one dollar of wealth among White families (Shapiro, 2017). Although this research only speaks to the trends and experiences of racial and ethnic minorities within the United States, it is demonstrative of the concomitant effects that marginalization and economic constraints can have on the pursuit of decent work among traditionally marginalized people.

Indirect Effects on Decent Work

In addition to the direct negative influences that marginalization and economic constraints have on the attainment of decent work, they are also proposed to have indirect influences through the mediating variables of work volition and career adaptability. What this suggests is that marginalization and economic constraints result in lower work volition and career adaptability, which in turn hinders the pursuit of decent work. Duffy, Diemer, Perry, Laurenzi, and Torrey (2012) defined work volition as a person’s perceived capacity to make occupational choices despite constraints, and career adaptability regards the resources a person possesses to cope with the frequently changing tasks related to vocational development (Savickas, 2002). Both work volition and career adaptability are considered to be malleable constructs that are shaped by the events ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• 1 The Psychology of Working and Workforce Readiness: How to Pursue Decent Work
• PART I Education
• PART II Employment
• PART III Technology
• PART IV Policy
• Prospects and Pitfalls in Building the Future Workforce
• Index