Feeling Positive, Negative, or Both? Examining the Self-Regulatory Benefits of Emotional Ambivalence

According to self-regulation theories, affect plays a crucial role in driving goal-directed behaviors throughout employees’ work lives. Yet past work presents inconsistent results regarding the effects of positive and negative affect with theory heavily relying on understanding the separate, unique effects of each affective experience. In the current research, we integrate tenets of emotional ambivalence with self-regulation theories to examine how the conjoint experience of positive and negative affect yields benefits for behavioral regulation. We test these ideas within a self-regulatory context that has frequently studied the benefits of affect and has implications for all employees at one point in their careers: the job search. Adopting a person-centered (i.e., profile-based) perspective across two within-person investigations, we explore how emotional ambivalence relates to job search success (i.e., interview invitations, job offers) via job search self-regulatory processes (i.e., metacognitive strategies, effort). Results illustrate that the subsequent week (i.e., at time t + 1; Study 1) and month (Study 2) after job seekers experience emotional ambivalence (i.e., positive and negative affect experienced jointly at similar levels at time t), they receive more job offers via increased job search effort and interview invitations. Theoretical and practical implications for studying emotional ambivalence in organizational scholarship are discussed.

Requirements for Project Managers—What Do Job Advertisements Say?

The growing number of projects and the key role of project managers in their implementation makes the competencies of managers a subject of many studies. An attempt can be made to determine the project manager competencies that employers appreciate the most through analyses of job advertisements. Due to a very large number of job advertisements, it may be difficult or even impossible to analyze their content manually. A solution may be to fetch and process job advertisements automatically. The main purpose of this paper was to identify the project manager competencies that are the most desired by employers. An analysis of job advertisements was performed to identify the project manager competencies required by employers. Job advertisements were automatically downloaded from online job boards. Fragments of job advertisements that described requirements were analyzed with text mining. The analysis included preprocessing, building of corpora of documents, construction of document-term matrices, application of traditional data mining methods, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), which is a popular topic modeling algorithm. After the initial text processing (all characters except letters were removed, uppercase letters were converted to lowercase letters, words deemed useless were removed, and words were converted to their basic form), n-grams were built, and topics identified with LDA were generated. The most frequently used words and n-grams, along with the identified topics, were graphically represented. The meanings of the words and sentences were not analyzed in the text mining analysis of the job advertisements. The analysis did not take into account whether the words appeared side by side in the document-except for the intentional creation of n-grams (such as “communication skill”). The analysis, however, facilitated the identification of certain patterns and regularities in the occurrence of specific strings in the documents (fragments of advertisements describing the requirements). The interpretation of the results is based on the frequency of words and n-grams and frequency of words in topics identified by the LDA algorithm. This paper contributes to science by showing that text mining of job offers can, to some extent, help determine project manager competencies in demand. The method can be used by organizations training future project managers to modify and better adapt curricula to the needs of the labor market. It can be used to monitor the current trends in project manager requirements as well.

Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with a Single Step: Transparity A Web-based Job Portal

Gender based discrimination is still common and one of the biggest issues in Pakistan. Transgender are ignored in almost every lifestyle. They face biasedness while finding for a job and are forced to earn money using unrespectable ways such as begging and dancing. Although, Pakistani law declares them equal citizen and many government as well as private organizations offer them jobs. Most of the transgender people remain unaware of these job offers due to the lack of an existing information propagation channel. This paper has proposed Transparity; which a dedicated online job portal for transgender. Transparity is also equipped with supportive features such as CV creation, online courses and motivational profiles to make it effective and helpful. Our study reveals that no such dedicated portal exists in Pakistan. This study focuses on the improvement of employment issues of transgender through.

(Mis)match between higher education supply and labour market needs: evidence from Portugal

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyse whether there is an adjustment between the Portuguese higher education supply and the needs of the labour market.Design/methodology/approachAn empirical study is performed, using a quantitative approach, relating the job offers for graduates registered at the employment centres and the number of graduates by higher education institutions (HEIs) in Portugal, at an aggregate level and NUT II regions, by areas of education and training, over the 2003–2018 period. To understand how job offers and graduates are correlated, bilateral Spearman's rank correlation coefficients were calculated.FindingsThe results show that, in large groups of educational areas, exists a match between the higher education supply and the labour market needs, with an emphasis on the fields of “social sciences, business and law”, “engineering, manufacturing and construction” and “health and welfare”. However, at a more disaggregated level, a mismatch in the sub-areas of “teacher training and education science” and “computing” was found since labour market needs are much greater than graduates by HEIs and the two variables are moving in opposite directions.Practical implicationsThe study has revealed important aspects that the educational policy should take into account in order to create the conditions for a gradual adjustment to the labour market needs. Also, the results demonstrate that some measures should be taken in short/medium term to avoid problems in the medium/long term.Originality/valueOne implication of this empirical study was the elaboration of a correspondence table to standardise the data analysis units from two different sources. As this correspondence did not exist prior to this study, this output is a relevant contribution to the research field. Another important contribution is the demonstration of a mismatch in some educational sub-areas that deserves special attention from educational policymakers.

Between College and That First Job: Designing and Evaluating Policies for Hiring Diversity

Despite widespread caste disparities, compensatory hiring policies remain absent from the Indian private sector. This paper employs novel administrative data on the job search from an elite college and evaluates policies to promote hiring diversity. Application reading, written aptitude tests, large group debates, and job choices do not explain caste disparities. Disparities arise primarily between the final round, comprising non-technical personal interviews, and job offers; the emergence closely parallels caste revelation. For promoting diversity, hiring subsidies — similar in spirit to the government-proposed Diversity Index — are twice as cost-effective as improving pre-college achievement. Conversely, quotas mirror a hiring tax and reduce university recruitment by 7%.

Preferences for work arrangements: A discrete choice experiment

This study investigates individual preferences for work arrangements in a discrete choice experiment. Based on sociological and economic literature, we identified six essential job attributes—earnings, job security, training opportunities, scheduling flexibility, prestige of the company, and gender composition of the work team—and mapped these into hypothetical job offers. Out of three job offers, with different specifications in the respective job attributes, respondents had to choose the offer they considered as most attractive. In 2017, we implemented our choice experiment in two large-scale surveys conducted in two countries: Germany (N = 2,659) and the Netherlands (N = 2,678). Our analyses revealed that respondents considered all six job attributes in their decision process but had different priorities for each. Moreover, we found gendered preferences. Women preferred scheduling flexibility and a company with a good reputation, whereas men preferred jobs with high earnings and a permanent contract. Despite different national labor market regulations, different target populations, and different sampling strategies for the two surveys, job preferences for German and Dutch respondents were largely parallel.

POLISH LABOR MARKET: CHANGES DURING THE PERIOD COVID-19

Outbreak of coronavirus pandemic caused the world economies to change greatly. The vast majority of enterprises in Poland were forced to restrict activity and almost all of them cut back on number of employees. In June 2020 most companies in Poland obtained “green lights” from the government for continuation their activity as before the pandemic outbreak. However the situation with restrictions still influences labor market in Poland. The issue of the study is currently of great interest, as qua-lity analysis gives clear interpretation of the pandemic impact on employment, considering Ukrainian workers, and dealing with adverse effect of the coronavirus crisis.The study analyzes important and the most significant Polish labour market changes in 2020 caused by the outbreak of COVID-19. It is stated that pandemic had controversial impact on economically active popula-tion and the number of job offers for unemployed. The study explores employment rates in Poland and outlines the main differ-ences between 2019 and 2020 data. The number of working places according to economy sectors and in general is assessed. It is defined that the Polish labour market recovers closely to pre crisis rates. Authors analyzed labour activity rates realized remotely in 2020. The influence of changes identified above on employment of Ukrainian workers in Poland is determined. Although Ukrainian and foreign analysts and researchers explored Polish labor market influenced by the coronavirus crisis in their works and papers, further deep investigations are needed. Thus, one of the novelty elements is thorough comparative out-line of changes in the labour services area. An attempt is made in this paper to show the ways of solving problems of unemploy-ment, limited number of job offers and economically inactive population.The primary concern of this research is to consider the Polish labour market current situation influenced by the coronavirus crisis, to analyze economic performance in 2020 compared to previous years, to highlight possible prospects, tasks or measures to improve labour market through reducing unemployment and increase in job offers.Keywords: unemployment, economic crisis, COVID-19 pandemic, employment, Polish labour market, job cuts, redundancy. У статті проаналізовано вагомі та найбільш помітні зміни на польському ринку праці у 2020 році, викликані розповсюдженням вірусу COVID-19. Зазначено, що пандемія неоднозначно вплинула на економічно активне населення та кількість робочих місць, які могли бути запропоновані безробітним. Проаналізовано показники зайнятості громадян Польщі та ви-значено основні відмінності між даними 2019 та 2020 років. Оцінено кількість ліквідованих робочих місць за секторами та в загальному значенні економіки. Визначено, що наразі польський ринок праці знаходиться на стадії відновлення, а його стан близький до передкризового. Автори проаналізували частоту трудової діяльності у 2020 році, що реалізовувалась у дистанційному вигляді, віддалено від постійного місця роботи. Визначено, яким чином зазначені зміни вплинули на пра-цевлаштування українців у Польщі. У дослідженні зроблено наукову спробу знайти шляхи вирішення таких проблем, як: безробіття, недостатня кількість пропонованих робочих місць та економічно неактивне населення.Ключові слова: безробіття, економічна криза, пандемія COVID-19, зайнятість населення, польський ринок праці, ліквідація робочих місць, скорочення працівників.