The interplay of career involvement and goal conflicts: An eight‐wave study with STEM professionals

Abstract

SummaryBased on a “whole‐life”‐perspective and integrating theories of self‐identity and resource management, the present longitudinal study examines the dynamic relationship between career involvement and conflicts between work and nonwork goals in a sample of 3095 German‐speaking doctoral students and doctorate holders (37.0% women) from various STEM fields. We expected increases in goal conflicts to decrease career involvement, and simultaneously tested reciprocal relationships, that is, from involvement on conflicts. The random intercept cross‐lagged panel model (RI‐CLPM) was used to analyze within‐person associations across eight measurement occasions (6‐month time intervals) while controlling for between‐person effects. At the between‐person level, career involvement and goal conflicts were negatively correlated. At the within‐person level, results showed negative cross‐lagged effects from goal conflicts to career involvement as well as negative cross‐lagged effects from career involvement to goal conflicts. This indicates that the interplay of goal conflicts and career involvement can result in either an upward or a downward spiral. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

STEMming the tide: New perspectives on careers and turnover

“…Noppeney et al (2024) unraveled reciprocal cross‐lagged relationships between involvement in STEM careers and conflicts arising from the clash between work and nonwork goals. Their study, featuring 3095 German scientists, poses a compelling question: To what extent does career involvement in STEM increase or decrease goal conflicts over time?…”

“…These findings challenge prevailing thinking that heavy investments in one life domain necessarily cause conflicts with other domains. Instead, it suggests that greater career involvement can nurture the development of a clear professional identity anchored around one's career and its associated goals, which in turn might alleviate goal conflicts by “reduc[ing] the room left for worrying about functioning in other life domains” (Noppeney et al’s, 2024; p. 384), or “making it easier to set priorities and, consequently, reducing the likelihood of goal conflict” (Noppeney et al’s, 2024; p. 385). Put simply, career involvement seems to enhance one's ability to meet personal goals in nonwork domains.…”

“…This may encompass investigating its impact on relational variables like marital satisfaction, family welfare, or engagement in family roles. Extending Noppeney et al (2024), researchers might investigate whether embeddedness in the work domain results in heightened or diminished demands within the nonwork domain.…”

When doubts take over: a longitudinal study on emerging disengagement in the PhD process

“…Data were drawn from a larger project investigating career paths of early career scientists within the STEM fields which began in 2014 (see also Alisic & Wiese, 2020;Burk et al, 2016;Burk & Wiese, 2018a, 2018bClaus et al, 2020;Frei & Grund, 2020;Lerche et al, 2022Lerche et al, , 2023Noppeney et al, 2022aNoppeney et al, , 2022b. Participants were asked to complete a total of eight online questionnaires (T1 to T8) with approximately 6-month intervals which included information about their current career-related experiences (over a total time course of roughly 4 years).…”

How to plug the leaky pipeline in clinical rheumatology across Europe—lessons to be learned from experiences in business

“…Our main explanatory variable of interest was gender, which we operationalized as indicator variable with the value of "1" indicating a female and "0" a male respondent. part-time employment, tenure in the current position, childcare responsibility, age, academic position as well as the institutional factor department size [30,31]. We took possible geographic differences into consideration through region-fixed-effects, based on indicator variables for Northern, Southern and Eastern Europe, Baltic countries, and Turkey, using the German-speaking region (Austria, Germany, Switzerland) as reference category.…”