Work does not speak for itself:Examining the incremental validity of personal branding in predicting knowledge workers’ employability

The changing context of contemporary knowledge work, including the massive adoption of home office work arrangements and a great resignation, calls for new research on the employability of knowledge workers. In this paper, we suggest that knowledge workers can no longer rely on developing their human capital and being intrapreneurial at work to secure their employability. With the aim to offer a new perspective, we test the incremental validity of personal branding in predicting employability over and above established predictors (i.e., human capital and intrapreneurship behaviours) and test the relationships in three studies (total N = 883), consisting of a supervisor sample (Study 1), a student sample (Study 2), and a time-lagged employee sample (Study 3). Results show that personal branding explains variance in employability over and above human capital and intrapreneurship behaviours. The results also show that the relationship between personal branding and employability is fully mediated by personal brand equity. The paper concludes with a discussion of the opportunities the concept of personal branding offers for employability research in the context of the contemporary world of work

Past career in future thinking: How career management practices shape entrepreneurial decision-making

This study builds a grounded model of how careers shape entrepreneurs’ preference for causal and effectual decision logics when starting new ventures. Using both verbal protocol analysis and interviews, we adopt a qualitative research approach to induct career management practices germane to entrepreneurial decision making. Based on our empirical findings, we develop a model conceptualizing how configurations of career management practices, reflecting different emphases on career planning and career investment, are linked to entrepreneurial decision making through the imprint that they leave on one’s view of the future, generating a tendency toward predictive and/or creative control. These findings extend effectuation theorizing by reformulating one of its most pervasive assumptions and showing how careers produce distinct pathways to entrepreneurial thinking, even prior to entrepreneurial entry

Psychological safety, job crafting, and employability: A comparison between permanent and temporary workers

Employability is one of the leading challenges of the contemporary organizational environment. While much is known about the positive effects of job crafting on employees’ employability in general, little is known about its effects when employment contacts are different. Differentiating between temporary and permanent workers, in this article we investigate how in the environment of psychological safety, these two types of employees engage in job crafting, and how job crafting is related to their perceived employability. Data were collected among two samples, consisting of temporary agency workers (N = 527), and permanent employees (N = 796). Structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses indicated a different pattern of results for the two groups: for permanent employees, increasing challenging job demands was positively, and decreasing hindering job demands was negatively related to perceived employability. Moreover, psychological safety was related to all job crafting dimensions. For agency workers, only increasing structural job resources was related to employability, while psychological safety was negatively associated with crafting hindrances. These findings suggest that a climate of psychological safety is particularly effective for permanent employees in fostering job crafting and employabilit