Social cognitive model of career self-management: Toward a unifying view of adaptive career behavior across the life span - Lent & Brown - 2013 - Article

The Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) consists of three models that try to explain interest development, choice-making, and performance and persistence in educational and vocational contexts. It is mostly derived from Bandura's General Social Cognitive Framework and tries to link existing theoretical approaches. Now a new and fourth SCCT model is introduced, which is about satisfaction/well-being in educational and vocational contexts. 

The Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) consists of three models that try to explain interest development, choice-making, and performance and persistence in educational and vocational contexts. It is mostly derived from Bandura's General Social Cognitive Framework and tries to link existing theoretical approaches. Now a new and fourth SCCT model is introduced, which is about satisfaction/well-being in educational and vocational contexts. 

SCCT is primarily designed to address a focused but important set of content questions, like predicting the types of educational and vocational activity domains toward which people will gravitate. One way to extend SCCT’s comprehensiveness, then, would be to add more of an explicit focus on the myriad process aspects of career development, addressing the dynamic ways in which people adapt to both routine career tasks and unusual career challenges, both within and across educational/vocational fields.

The traditional emphasis of career theories lies on the “big four” outcomes of interests, choice, performance, and satisfaction. But because of the changing context of work, new models are required. This article tries to develop a model of career self-management that focueses on relatively micro-level processes, focused on adaptive behaviors and on the factors (both environment and person-based) that promote (or deter) their use.

What main concepts do they talk about? 

The term career is used in a generic sense to encompass work or occupational behavior, regardless of the prestige level of a given form of work. The model presented in this study assumes that people are able to assert some measure of personal control, or agency, in at least some aspects of their own career development. The focus is in specific mechanisms through which people are partly able to direct their career actions to accomplish personal ends. Agency made it possible for people to engage in forethought, intentional action and self-reflection. This enables people to participate in their own career choice and is provides necessary foundation for the provision of career services. The term career self-management is used because the proposed model focuses on factors that influence the individual’s purposive behavior. SCCT views people as living within a social world, with ever-present opportunities to be influenced by, as well as to influence.

What is the relation between agency and adaptive career behaviors?

SCCT’s existing models are mostly concerned with the content or types of fields toward which people gravitate and the activities they perform at school and work.The career selfmanagement model is intended to focus on the relatively pervasive processes and mechanisms that direct career behavior within and across the specific fields and jobs people enter. The self-management model emphasizes the factors that lead people to enact behaviors that aid their own educational and occupational progress, like planning, information-gathering, deciding, goalsetting, job-finding, self-asserting, preparing for change, negotiating transitions. 

Adaptive career behaviors are related to constructs like career process skills, comptetencies, meta-competencies, selfregulation and coping skills. Those behaviors are the ones people use to try to achieve their own career objectives. Adaptive career behaviors are also relevant to discussions of specific strategies that workers use to manage their career behavior or cope with specific challenges.

What research has been done about Adaptive Career Behaviors? 

Career behaviors are referred to as career competencies or process skills, like self-assertion, general planning, career advancement, and cognitive coping skills. Students reporting higher self-efficacy demonstrated greater behavioral competence. It is not always clear whether studies involving social cognitive process variables, such as career decision self-efficacy (CDSE), actually test SCCT’s hypotheses in a formal sense. Generally, studies are conceptually related to SCCT but do not formally test it because the theory was not explicitly designed either to incorporate or predict career indecision as a general state. An effort to bridge SCCT with such process-focused inquiry may both broaden the theory’s range of applicability and clarify which SCCT hypotheses, if any, are being tested in a given study.

What is the definition of Adaptive Career Behaviors? 

Adaptive career behaviors are behaviors that people employ to help direct their own career (and educational) development, both under ordinary circumstances and when beset by stressful conditions. These are behaviors that are both proactively and reactively. Career and educational development encompasses periods of work preparation, entry, adjustment, and change. As mechanisms of agency enable people to play a part in their self-development, adaptation, and self-renewal. Individuals will negotiate developmental tasks at different paces, some will necessarily recycle to tasks associated with earlier periods, and the tasks associated with some periods can overlap considerably. Where recycling occurs, it does not necessarily signify developmental failure or floundering; it may well be mandated by circumstances (e.g., job loss) or personal intentions (e.g., voluntary career renewal, the desire to locate better fitting or more meaningful work). Changes in the context of work have rendered many people’s careers less linear, hierarchical, stable, or organizationcentric than in times past. 

What are the preforming developing tasks? 

Adaptive career behaviors include a fairly heterogeneous set of behaviors that form at least two larger conceptual clusters. The first cluster involves engaging in relatively normative and proactive developmental tasks that are associated with age-related cognitive development and nurtured by social learning experiences. These skills form a scaffolding for further career development. Included within the developmental task cluster are career-relevant tasks that are socially prescribed for most individuals. The second cluster involves what may be termed coping skills and processes. These are typically reactive behaviors that are initiated to negotiate life-role transitions and to adjust to challenging, and often unforeseen, work and work–life situations, such as role conflicts, work stress, and job loss. Whether involving the management of transitions or coping with difficult events or work conditions, the focus is on ways in which people attempt to steer themselves around hurdles and to achieve a reasonable level of career adaptation. The effective use of coping skills is part of the network of factors that foster resilience in career development and that aid people to anticipate and try to forestall negative career events.

What is the Link Between Adaptive Behavior and Career Outcomes?

Career adaptability can best be concepualized in terms of a collection of behaviors that can be learned. However, the performance of these behaviors may be facilitated by certain traits as well as by environmental supports. Adaptive career behaviors should be seen as instrumental or intermediate to other, more distal outcomes, rather than as representing ultimate outcomes in themselves. 

What model can be used with Career Self-Management? 

The career self-management model needs to be devided in two parts. 

• Proximal Antecedents of Adaptive Career Behaviors.  The exercise of adaptive career behaviors, such as engaging in career exploration or job-finding activities, is assumed to be affected by self-efficacy, outcome expectations, goals, and environmental supports and barriers. In keeping with the prior SCCT models, each of these proximal antecedents of adaptive behavior is conceived in domain-, state-, context-, and temporally specific terms. That is, rather than constituting global adaptability traits, they are seen as personal or environmental attributes that are relatively malleable and responsive to particular developmental or situational challenges. However certain traits are also assumed to influence the exercise of adaptive career behaviors or their outcomes.

• Cognitive-person factors. Self-efficacy refers to personal beliefs about one’s ability to perform particular behaviors or courses of action.

Self-efficacy and outcome expectations are seen as promoting adaptive career behaviors both directly and indirectly, through the mediating effects of personal goals. Several theories propose that actions are partly motivated by goals, or intentions to perform the actions. These theories also suggest that certain types or qualities of goals are especially facilitative of action. Goal-directed actions (e.g., engaging in career exploratory or job search behaviors) make it more likely that people will attain the outcomes they seek. Self-efficacy is also seen as having a direct link to outcomes, or attainments, because of its roles in helping people to organize their actions and to persist in the face of challenges. It should be noted that the cognitive-person variables in the model are seen as operating in concert with environmental influences that have the capacity to enable or limit agency and to codetermine the outcomes of adaptive behaviors. They also operate jointly with other person inputs, such as personality factors. 

What are contextual and personality factors for this model?

People are most likely to set and implement goals for adaptive career behaviors when they are stimulated by environmental supports and they have few barriers. Contextual support and barriers can promote goals and actions and they can moderate the relation of goals to action.  Supports and barriers may relate indirectly to goals through their links to self-efficacy and outcome expectations. Contextual influencas can also directly affect the outcomes of adaptive behaviors and they can moderate action-outcome relations. Conscientiousness is the most important personality variable that facilitates the use of adaptive behaviors that require planning and persistence. Personality factors can influence the careers by making behavioral prestations easier.

Quality of performance is likely to depend on ability as well as self-efficacy and the other proximal variables in the self-management model. Research on career self-management could include a focus on abilities, particularly where quality of performance is of special interest. 

What are distal antecedents and experiential sources of Adaptive Career Behaviors? 

Consistent with SCCT’s general model of choice behavior, the distal variables include a variety of person inputs that, together, comprise the individual’s initial social address.  Although it represents a starting point, developmentally speaking, this address provides an important social learning context for acquiring self-efficacy and outcome expectations regarding adaptive career behaviors. An important point is that person inputs, such as gender, ethnicity, social class, and sexual orientation, are seen as affecting the exercise of career agentic behaviors largely indirectly, for example, via cultural socialization experiences that convey information about self-efficacy. More specifically, such socialization or learning experiences convey four types of information relevant to self-efficacy  and outcome expectations: personal performance accomplishments, observational learning (or modeling), social encouragement and persuasion, and physiological and affective states and reactions. In addition to these four types of experience, self-efficacy is seen as affecting outcome expectations because people often expect more positive outcomes when they view themselves as capable performers. The four learning experiences largely mediate the effect of person inputs and background contextual affordances on the social cognitive variables that enable career agency. 

What did they conclude? 

The extension of SCCT is a developmental task and coping challenge of career self-management. The self-management model focuses on the underlying adaptive career behavior that occurs across occupational paths instead of only on the contentiriented issues like field choice. The new model is a broad framework that can be adapted to the study of a wide range of adaptive career behaviors. The model’s explanatory utility and the joint operation of its component variables still needs to be assessed in future research.