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In this chapter, the authors present a conceptual perspective on resilience that is grounded in self-regulation theory, to help address theoretical, empirical, and practical concerns in this domain. Despite the growing popularity of resilience research (see Linnenluecke, 2017), scholars have noted ongoing concerns about conceptual confusion and resulting, paradoxical, stigmatization associated with the label “resilience” (e.g., Adler, 2013; Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, & Klieger, 2016; Luthar, Cicchetti, & Becker, 2000). The authors seek to advance this domain via presenting a clarified, theoretically grounded conceptualization that can facilitate unified theoretical advancements, aligned operationalization, research model development, and intervention improvements. Resilience is defined here as continued, self-regulated goal striving (e.g., behavioral and/or psychological) despite adversity (i.e., after goal frustration). This self-regulatory conceptualization of resilience offers theoretically based definitions for the necessary conditions (i.e., adversity and overcoming) and outlines specific characteristics (i.e., unit-centered and dynamic) of resilience, distinguishes resilience from other persistence-related concepts (e.g., grit and hardiness), and provides a framework for understanding the connections (and distinctions) between resilience, performance, and well-being. After presenting this self-regulatory resilience perspective, the authors outline additional paths forward for the domain.

This chapter integrates the motivation phenomenon of goal hierarchy and equifinality into the employee resilience conceptualization to highlight adaptive manifestations of resilience to failure at work. Experienced failure offers an important context to consider adaptive resilience, as failure may offer feedback that pre-failure strategies will not lead to higher-level goal accomplishment; making lower-level goal changes critical for success. This chapter offers a fine-gained presentation of what employee resilience does (and does not entail), to address current concerns about: (a) a lack of agreement concerning what “positive adaptation” means; and (b) potential dangers in the unknowing encouragement of maladaptive resilience after failure (e.g., harms to employee well-being and success). Here, goal revision or abandonment at a lower-level of one’s goal hierarchy, as opposed to higher-level goal abandonment, is presented as a form of adaptive employee resilience. This change places the focus of employee resilience on perseverance toward big picture goals, rather than traits or outcomes associated with perseverance; which helps to further distinguish resilience from related concepts, antecedents, and outcomes. This conceptual clarity is useful in furthering the nomological network development of resilience, and better equips researchers and practitioners for assessing and promoting adaptive resilient responses to failure.

The process of occupational stress is dynamic, and thus must be conceptualized through an intraindividual perspective. Theories of self-regulation model feedback loops in goal pursuit and have meaningful implications for occupational well-being, from the task-level to years across the career span. In particular, discrepancy (the distance between one’s actual and desired states) and velocity (the speed at which one is moving towards a desired state) influence reactions in goal-striving. We extend theory bridging the self-regulation, occupational health, and career literatures by outlining the effects of discrepancy and velocity feedback for well-being, which we ground in cybernetic theories of stress, coping, and well-being. Further, we consider change at the macro scale by delimiting the impact of velocity, experienced in the pursuit of goals across Super’s (1980) career stages, on worker health. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of velocity and health over the career stages.

To provide a keener understanding of consumers’ decision-making processes and motivations regarding deliberate counterfeit consumption, this paper aims to integrate insights from several theoretical perspectives and the relevant literature. It proposes an overlooked yet important goal-directed interactionist perspective and identifies and tests a novel construct called consumers’ perceived counterfeit detection (PCD) in a proposed model.

This paper uses a comprehensive review of the literature to justify its proposed perspective, PCD construct and model, followed by in-depth interviews and survey data to test its proposed model and hypotheses.

Besides the theoretical insights derived from the proposed goal-directed interactionist perspective, empirical results demonstrate the important role that PCD plays in counterfeit consumption. In fact, PCD not only negatively and directly affects consumers’ intentions to deliberately purchase counterfeits but also weakens the positive effect consumers’ attitudes have on their purchase intentions.

This research makes several theoretical contributions. First and foremost, differing from other approaches (e.g. personal, economic and ethical), this research justifies an overlooked yet important goal-directed interactionist perspective and develops a refined and substantive framework including its proposed PCD construct. This framework provides opportunities to investigate behavior as an interpretative and dynamic process, vitalizing the domain of counterfeit-consumption behavior studies in particular and ethical behavior research in general. Second, at the construct level, the proposed hypothetical construct of PCD comprises the building blocks for knowledge advancement. Finally, rather than testing theories incrementally (such as the theory of planned behavior and the theory of reasoned action), this research fosters the development of new ideas regarding our proposed goal-directed interactionist perspective and PCD construct, which can be applied to other contexts and constructs that share the same or similar mechanisms and features.

According to the proposed goal-directed interactionist perspective, this research offers insights regarding why understanding consumers’ different goals (e.g. social-adjustive vs value-expressive; attainment vs maintenance) is important for marketers; how consumers’ goals interplay with their choices through their actions and consumption (e.g. compete vs substitute); and why, how and when their goals interact with their actions, choices and situations during their goal-setting, goal-striving and goal-realization stages that may lead to unethical behavior. At the construct level, the better marketers understand PCD, the more effectively they can use it. At the level of relationships and procedures, this research can offer important insights for businesses that look for “best practices” in the fight against deliberate counterfeit consumption.

First, by integrating insights from goal-directed behavior, self-regulatory theories and interactionist theory, this paper proposes its own goal-directed interactionist perspective. It then develops and tests a refined and substantive model of counterfeit decision-making in which PCD stands as a novel construct. The paper’s proposed perspective and model provide opportunities to investigate behavior as an interpretative and dynamic process, taking the domain of ethical behavior research (e.g. counterfeit-consumption behavior) from descriptive frameworks to testable theories.

The purpose of this paper is to test the combined influence of working towards self-concordant goals with goal planning and supervisory support on goal progress and job satisfaction.

The data were collected among prison guards. The analysis takes into account a multilevel perspective on goals by differentiating between within- and between-person variance.

The results showed that there was no direct effect of self-concordance on goal progress. Goal progress depended on combining self-concordant goals with conscious planning and receiving supervisory support. Furthermore, it was found that job satisfaction and goal progress influenced each other over time.

The findings confirm that to understand the influence of self-concordant goals within organizations, planning and supervisory support are essential elements for achieving goal progress. This research is the first to confirm the interrelatedness of goal progress and job-satisfaction over time.

The multilevel intra and interpersonal approach provides a more thorough insight into the processes involved with goal striving. It emphasizes the importance of differentiation between the different levels of motivation in Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory, especially when applied within the work context.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an interpretation of the lived experiences of salespersons’ work engagement and work-related flow and how these states are related.

A mixed-methods qualitative investigation on a sample of 14 salespeople from a large Australian-based consumer goods enterprise was conducted. Using interpretative phenomenological analyses and ethnographic content analyses the antecedents and conditions for salesperson work engagement and work-related flow were investigated.

The data showed that affective, cognitive and conative dimensions underpinned the experience of work engagement and work-related flow. Work engagement was interpreted as an aroused and self-regulated psychological state of energy, focus and striving aimed to address the situational and task relevant opportunities and demands encountered. Work-related flow was characterized by passion, absorption, eudaimonia and automatic self-regulation of goal pursuit.

The sample was from a single manufacturing organization with sales roles focussed primarily on business-to-business selling, and as such the generalizability of results to salespeople working in different contexts (e.g. retail sales, telesales) needs to be established.

The research helps sales managers to take more account of the conditions that foster salesperson engagement and flow.

This study represents one of the first attempts to interpret, compare and contrast the lived experience of salesperson work engagement with that of work-related flow. The study also adds to the relative paucity of research published on work engagement using qualitative methods.

The purpose of this paper is to arrive at a conceptual understanding of perseverance processes in the context of enterprising behavior and to outline readily employable perseverance strategies for situations characterized by obstacles, challenges and setbacks.

This paper presents a process model of perseverance, drawing on elements of control theory and appraisal theory.

From this model, a variety of perseverance strategies within four broad categories is derived: strategies that affect adversity itself; strategies that change the way adversity is perceived; strategies that reframe the aim that adversity has made difficult to attain; and strategies that help to increase self‐regulatory strength. James Dyson's biography provides examples for the strategies.

The paper discusses a broad variety of strategies to help individuals persevere in reaching their enterprising goals.

Although it is a widely held perception that perseverance is needed to successfully start and run a venture, the perseverance process and perseverance strategies have received little research attention.

A daily diary study was used to examine the relationships between goal distance, goal velocity, affect, expectancies, and effort from the perspective of Carver and Scheier's (1998) control theory of self-regulation. Fifteen social workers completed a diary at the end of each working day for four weeks. Multi-level analysis found little support for the precice predictions of Carver and Scheier's theory, but did support the idea that discrepancy reduction plays a role in regulating behavior. Expectancies had a strong association with effort, and affect moderated this relationship. The interaction indicated that high expectancies suppress the signalling effects of affect, preventing the individual from being consumed by immediate reactions to situational events and enabling effort to be sustained.

I present a framework for thinking about personal happiness. Ideas from philosophy are combined with research on happiness from various scientific traditions. But treatments in philosophy tend to be atomistic, focusing on one narrow approach at the exclusion of others; treatments in psychology tend also to be circumscribed, emphasizing specific hypotheses but at the neglect of overarching theory. My approach posits a far-reaching theoretical model, rooted in goal-directed action, yet mindful of nonpurposive sources of happiness as well. The heart of the theory is self-regulation of desires and decisions, which rests on self-conscious examination and application of self-evaluative standards for leading a moral life in the broadest sense of guiding how we act in relation to others. Seven elements of happiness are then developed and related to the conceptual framework. These encompass love and caring; work as a calling; brain systems underpinning wanting, liking, and pleasure; the need to deal with very bad and very good things happening to us; the role of moral concerns and emotions; the examined life and its distractions; and finally spirituality and transcendental concerns. The final section of the chapter sketches everyday challenges and choices academics face.