Date of Award

8-1-2023

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of Psychology

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Kevin J Williams

Committee Members

Michael T Ford, Sanjay Goel, Jason G Randall

Keywords

Appraisal, Congtingent Worker, Contingent Faculty, Emotion, Hope, Professional Development

Subject Categories

Organizational Behavior and Theory

Abstract

Employers and employees face new challenges with the rapid increase in contingent employment. This dissertation focuses on career development, one critical challenge contingent employees face. Contingent employees often receive limited resources and employer support, increasing career management's difficulties and uncertainty. As a result, contingent employees may need to exert greater “willpower” and “waypower” in their pursuit of career goals. Snyder’s hope theory (Snyder, 2002) and Lazarus and Folkman’s (1984) appraisal theory were employed to explore and explain how hope relates to contingent workers’ engagement in career development activities. Snyder (2002) posited hope as a goal-oriented thinking process involving agency and pathways thinking. Agency thinking is the willpower, and pathways thinking is the waypower toward the goal pursuit. Based on Snyder’s hope theory, I hypothesized that hope positively relates to engagement in professional development activities and perceived possibilities of achievement and success in contingent workers. When integrating appraisal theory with hope theory, I proposed that emotions play an important role in the hopeful thinking process. Specifically, emotions are the results of hopeful thinking and the predictors of state hope. To test the hypotheses, two studies were carried out in a specific group of contingent workers – contingent faculty members, given that they are likely to have similar career goals.Study 1 used vignettes that described a slightly harder-than-average semester during which multiple difficulties and challenges were presented to contingent faculty members and researchers, who were asked to role-play as a person who went through the relatively rough semester and respond to the events described. The results found that participants who scored higher on state hope pathways reported a greater likelihood of engaging in two types of professional development activities (improving knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) and seeking feedback). In addition, emotions correlated with participants’ appraisals of the semester and further predicted state hope components. Positive emotions were associated with increased agency and pathways, whereas negative emotions were negatively related to agency and pathways. Counterintuitively, when trait pathways were high, the relationships between negative emotions and state hope components were more negative. Study 2 used a daily diary study to test the hypothesis in situ. Contingent faculty were asked to report adverse events they encountered every day for 14 consecutive days and to record their appraisals and emotional responses to them. The results found that, on a daily basis, state agency thinking predicted positively the engagement in improving KSAs and state pathways thinking seeking feedback. Similar relationships were found among appraisals, emotions, and state hope components, as in study 1. Most importantly, emotions were consistently found to significantly predict state hope. The effects were generally stronger at an aggregated level than on a daily level. This research contributes to the theory of hope by integrating Snyder’s hope theory and Lazarus and Folkman’s appraisal theory, providing a more complete view of hope. The study findings provided support for the positive relationships between hope components and the engagement in professional development activities in contingent workers and for the important role of emotions, serving both as outcomes of appraisals and antecedents of state hope. In addition, the two studies' inconsistent relationships between trait pathways and appraisals call for further studies to explore the relationships between appraisals and trait hope in greater detail. Practically, the findings imply the necessity of training on hopeful thinking, which can boost engagement in professional development activities.

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