Search results

The study provides practice-based vignettes describing career shocks as experienced by executives. It also offers a brief description of the approaches taken by the coach in helping executives to cope with their initial reactions. This work informs the readers about examples of career shocks in the executive population and provides access to normally rarely available information about sensitive aspects of psychological life of executives.

This paper is a qualitative exploration of managers' career shock experiences reflected in executive coaching interventions. It takes an anecdotal look at how executives react to shocks of various valences, and how coaching attempts to assist them by processing their first reactions and choosing a response. The paper particularly looks at managers' responses almost immediately following a shocking event triggering their request for coaching help.

Coaching conversation serves as opportunities for handling immediate emotional reactions to career disruptions. Even shocks with positive valence can cause ambivalent reactions. Processing of career shocks through coaching conversations can activate agency in dealing with abrupt career events. Coaches can offer further support in career deliberations. In one of the cases, an instance of anticipation of a negative career event was associated with positive hopes, and the non-occurrence of the event led to further elaboration about one's career options.

This work is based on a small sample of executives experiencing career shocks.

This work informs executives about opportunities provided by executive coaching in handling difficult reactions to external career events. Coaches or coaches-in-training receive an overview of coaching requests associated with career shocks.

With the increasing instability in careers the paper draws the attention to the helping potential of coaching to those experiencing career shocks. It also contributes to normalization of turning for support in psychologically burdening situations.

This work is a trigger for further consideration of the experiences of career shocks by business executives. It provides a first look into immediate reactions of this career population to unexpected external disruptions. It also offers opportunities for further exploration of the role executive coaching can play in career deliberations.

The purpose of this article is to raise awareness of the dynamic character of career and its key attributes, and the embeddedness of their definitions and meanings in national social, political and economic contexts.

Features of three recent distinct social, political and economic situations in Russia are used to explore the meanings of nine key career attributes introduced by the Western career literature.

It was found that in Russia each of the nine key career attributes accommodates a different meaning compared with their original Western meaning, and that these meanings are continuously changing to reflect the current social, political and economic environment. In sum, this exploration revealed a dynamic character to career attributes, and their content changed depending on the underlying context.

Among key research implications are: a possibility of using Western career theories mainly as conceptual frameworks for studying careers in other countries; that current social, political and economic contexts need to be taken into consideration when studying careers in a particular country; and the “intelligent career” concept can be used to study careers in various cultural contexts, and to examine the interdependence between career and a national culture.

This paper examines the extent to which Western career concepts may be used to study careers in various countries around the globe. It notes the dynamic character of career and its related career attitudes. This paper also makes suggestions on how the “intelligent career” concept can be used for exploring career meanings in a particular national setting. Finally, this paper looks at specifics of careers in Russia, which are still underrepresented in the literature.

While much research has been done on how attitudes toward therapy relate to engagement in it, the willingness to engage in coaching has not yet been studied. As coaching continues to grow in popularity and makes its way into curricula of Master of Business Administration (MBA) programs, it is worth examining what factors may influence people's attitudes toward this new type of psychological support. With frequently noticed and discussed similarities between coaching and therapy, the purpose of this paper is to examine whether particular antecedents of engagement in therapy, namely mental health stigma and gender, would be equally relevant for engagement in coaching by MBA students.

This was survey research with 54 MBAs at a major European business school.

The results suggest that while gender does influence an individual's attitude toward therapy, it does not influence an individual's attitude toward coaching. Stigma, however, still impacts attitudes toward both therapy and coaching.

This paper focusses on attitudes. Further research could explore how closely attitudes result in specific behaviors, such as requesting a coach or agreeing to be coached when suggested by MBA program educators.

Implications concern positioning of coaching within MBA programs and preparation of coaches and educators.

Gender neutrality of willingness to engage in coaching suggests opportunities for acceptance of other forms of psychological support.

This paper is one of the early investigations of willingness to be coached, particularly in the MBA context.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a growing body of literature on the role of family in managers’ career decision making. Specifically, the authors offer an empirical elaboration on a recently proposed concept of the “family-relatedness of work decisions” (FRWD) by illuminating the role of the spouse in managers’ career sensemaking.

In total, 88 managers who were in the final stage of their EMBA program took part in the study. The data were gathered through a personal career inventory.

The findings revealed that next to family-career salience and parent role identification, spouses also play an important role in shaping managers’ family-related career sensemaking.

Future research should examine the supportive role of spouses in contexts other than that of an international EMBA. Moreover, researchers should examine the role of managers’ boundary management styles in shaping the degree of their family-related career sensemaking.

The paper suggests that when designing and implementing developmental initiatives, organizations should consider that managers’ decisions about their next career steps may be guided by family-related concerns, and the spouse may play a specific role.

This paper offers the first empirical exploration and a refinement of the nascent theory of the “FRWD.” It also introduces a new construct into the theory – spousal career support – that opens new avenues for future research.

This paper aims to introduce a collection of papers about careers in cross‐cultural perspective, which contributes to the growing body of literature that addresses careers from different locations around the world.

Introduces the topic, providing some background and discussion of the main concepts.

Briefly introduces the papers and their main findings – differences and similarities among careers and career attributes in different cultural and national contexts.

Contextualizes the issue and extends the overall knowledge in the topic.