Career Calling Across Culture And Generations

This symposium brings together an international group of scholars discussing original contributions and insights on the experience of Career Calling across cultural and generational boundaries. Calling is a purposeful, meaningful, and passion-driven engagement in a career that one feels destined to pursue and that contributes to the greater good and to an individual’s identity. The deep roots of calling in Christian traditions lead to question whether career calling has the same meaning across different countries and generations. The goal of this symposium is to share recent insights on the extent to which approaching work as a calling is a salient construct across different cultures. The co-chair will introduce career calling to the audience through an interactive assessment (12 minutes). The presenters will review data and results (8 minutes each) and open the Q&A sessions with one question to the audience and a takehome message (7 minutes). The Chair will summarize key points and highlight possible future directions (8 minutes). The first two contributions present the results of an international cross-cultural project on calling. First, a qualitative study of how people from 4 continents and 13 ountries conceptualize calling will be presented. Then, a quantitative test of the universality of career calling across 6 countries and 7 languages will be presented. Three more presentations will focus on the cross-cultural equivalence of the relations between calling and presence of purpose, work centrality, career selfefficacy, decidedness, and job performance across the US, China, Hong Kong, and Italy. In the last presentation, differences and similarities in how four different generations in the US define calling and its scope will be discussed