New Insights on Career Calling and the Pathways to its Positive and Negative Outcomes

The recent decade has seen a growing interest in the concept of career calling that can be broadly understood as purposeful, meaningful, and passion-driven engagement in a career that one feels drawn to pursue and that contributes to a greater good. Although debates continue taking place about how to define this concept, research increasingly shows that career calling has important implications for individuals (e.g., job satisfaction, well-being, etc.) and organizations (e.g., job performance, turnover intentions, etc.; Thompson & Bunderson, 2019). The majority of research shows positive outcomes of calling, but there is also evidence that calling has a “dark side” and it is related with negative outcomes (e.g. burnout, workaholism, and organizational exploitation; Bunderson & Thompson, 2009; Duffy, Dik, Douglass, England, & Velez, 2018). Nevertheless, we still know little about the mechanisms and conditions explaining when calling has positive and/or negative effects on diverse work and career-related outcomes (Lysova, Dik, Duffy, Khapova, & Arthur, 2019). To address this, the symposium brings together an internationally-diverse group of expert scholars, to share their fresh insights on the topic. By combining five methodologically-diverse papers, this symposium pursues the following important aims to: a) enrich understanding of the mechanisms and conditions explaining how and when calling has positive and/or negative effects on diverse work- and career-related outcomes; b) contribute to the further development of theory and research on calling; c) draw scholars' attention to calling as an important and promising concept for understanding individual and organizational work- and career-related outcomes.