How changing work and family demands during COVID-19 (De)motivated academic parents to craft sustainable careers?

BACKGROUND: Covid-19 has introduced many contextual changes into individuals' work and family lives, affecting their career sustainability. Although previous studies have provided evidence for these changes, little is known about how changing contextual demands (de)motivated them to take proactive initiatives for crafting sustainable careers. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to explore how changing work and family demands of academic parents during Covid-19 affected their career sustainability indicators and career initiatives regarding health, happiness, and productivity. METHODS: Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 21 academic parents during the post-lockdown period of Covid-19 in Turkey. We analyzed the qualitative data by using content analysis via MAXQDA software. RESULTS: Results revealed differing career sustainability experiences and initiatives regarding gender roles, career stage, and work/family demands and resources. Notably, women academics with higher contextual demands and lower contextual resources and early-career academics reported relatively adverse experiences concerning their health, happiness, and productivity. Besides, even though early-career academics faced problems with sustaining their career development, they were relatively more oriented to engage in career initiatives, such as reorganizing developmental needs, improving career skills, and seeking career support and guidance. CONCLUSIONS: This study sheds light on the context, time, and person aspects of sustainable careers during Covid-19. Moreover, the study represents one of the first investigations into the proactive initiatives for crafting sustainable careers during the pandemic and provides a deeper insight into the (de)motivators for career proactivity.

Throwback to pre-pandemic days: A photo-elicitation study on organizational nostalgia.

BACKGROUND: As an unprecedented outbreak, the COVID-19 pandemic has restricted and dramatically changed several respects of life. In terms of working life, the transition to a remote working system has brought several changes and interrupted the continuity between past and present working life. In this case, this adversity has led people to past experiences and memories, and many people have used nostalgia as a crucial resource for alleviating the negative impact of the outbreak. OBJECTIVE: In this context, as a form of nostalgia, the current study particularly investigated memories eliciting organizational nostalgia and antecedents and consequences of organizational nostalgia in the pandemic era. METHODS: Photo-elicitation interview in general, and participant-driven photo-elicitation in particular, was used as a data collection method. A cross-sectional design was employed for this study. In total, 10 photo-elicitation interviews through 62 photos were carried out with participants in Turkey. The thematic analysis was used for coding and analyzing the interviews. RESULTS: The current study demonstrated that (1) participants feel nostalgic for managers, colleagues, events, job, and working environment-related memories; (2) lack of social connectedness, loneliness, anxiety, fear, and uncertainty triggers pandemic-induced nostalgia; and (3) pandemic-induced organizational nostalgia has an impact on the variety of emotions (regret, hope, pride, freedom, joy, peace, excitement, yearning, gratitude, sadness, and happiness) of employees in the pandemic era. CONCLUSIONS: This study contributes to overcoming the lack of studies investigating the nostalgic emotion of employees in the pandemic era and how this emotion might contribute to overcoming the effects of COVID-19.