Development of Career Callings in Organizations - Evidence from a Multilevel and Multisource Longitudinal Study on the Roles of Leaders and Job Performance

Career callings are characterized as a profound sense of purpose that guides individuals toward career paths that are aligned with their identity and passion. In the last 20 years, the study of a calling increased exponentially in the realm of organizational behavior, and yet the development of callings is still an open question. This research addresses this gap with two studies that investigate the longitudinal relationships between leaders' and followers' career callings, task performance, and the underlying mechanisms that influence these dynamics. In Study 1, we employed a three-wave longitudinal design and cross-lagged Structural Equation Models for panel data to assess the temporal precedence between task performance and calling among 285 employees. We observed that self-evaluations of task performance are more likely to be a predictor of a calling, rather than an outcome. Moreover, we show that a leader's own sense of calling serves as a predictor of their followers' sense of a calling, indicating that the leader-follower dynamic plays a pivotal role in shaping career callings within organizations. Building on these insights, Study 2 delved deeper into the processes and conditions of the relationship between leaders' and followers' career callings on a sample of 157 leaders and 656 followers. We observed that the sense of a calling can spill over from leaders to followers when employees feel well-supported and engage in high-quality exchanges with their leaders. These studies offer valuable theoretical and practical implications for the fields of career calling development and leadership. They shed light on the social antecedents of career callings, and highlight the substantial influence that leaders have on their followers' perceptions of calling. Furthermore, these studies show that leaders influence followers’ calling through the means of a supporting, high-quality relation. These results offer insights on how to handle effective career development processes in organizations.