We applied the social cognitive model of career self-management (CSM) to the study of proactive career behavior, referring to workers’ active attempts to guide their own career development. Within the CSM framework, proactive behavior is conceived as a key agentic ingredient linking cognitive, social, and personality mechanisms with a variety of career advancement and sustainability outcomes. A sample of 511 early to mid-career adult workers in the U.S. completed an online survey including measures of proactive career behavior, self-efficacy, and outcome expectations; proactive personality; supervisory support; and three positive career self-management outcomes (perceived career success, growth in work rewards, and job marketability). We tested measurement and structural models, respectively, examining the factor structures of, and hypothesized paths among, the constructs. These models offered good overall fit to the data and were found to be invariant across gender. We consider the implications of the findings for future inquiry on career sustainability from a social cognitive perspective.

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The social cognitive model of restorative well-being (Lent, 2004) focuses on the means by which people help to stabilize their emotional functioning after exposure to challenging life conditions. We extended this model to the study of how international students navigate psychological adjustment to life in the United States. In this application, we focused on the interplay of cognitive, behavioral, social, and trait mechanisms that may help to mitigate distress and promote well-being in the context of change and transition. Participants were 233 international students at U.S. colleges and universities who completed measures of acculturative stress, life satisfaction, social support, self-efficacy in coping with life changes, general self-efficacy, and acculturation- and enculturation-based coping behaviors. Findings indicated that the model provided good fit to the data. Coping efficacy was strongly predictive of lower levels of acculturative stress, which in turn predicted life satisfaction together with general self-efficacy. We consider implications of the findings for future research as well as for interventions designed to prevent psychological distress and to promote effective coping among international students and in a broad range of other stress and coping contexts, such as life role transitions.

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