What's New on Calling: Multi-Method Insights on its Predictors and Outcomes

People increasingly seek meaning and purpose in their job and careers, and eventually quit their job if they experience a lack of meaning and purpose (Allan et al., 2019; De Smet et al., 2021). Extreme experience of meaning and purpose in one’s job or career is captured by the concept of calling. While scientists keep debating on its conceptualization (Dik & Shimizu, 2019), the experience of work as a calling can be broadly understand as as a purposeful, meaningful, and passion-driven engagement in a career that one feels drawn to pursue, that contributes to a greater good and for which people are willing to make sacrifices (Vianello et al., 2018). The past two decades has shown a growing scholarly interest in the topic (Duffy & Dik, 2013; Dobrow et al., 2019; Thompson & Bunderson, 2019; Shabram et al., 2022), showing that perceiving a calling is a positive resource and is related to well-being, higher life satisfaction, commitment, and better work performance (Dobrow et al., 2019; Vianello et al., 2022). Yet many questions concerning how people can develop a calling for their career as well as which are its behavioral and non-attitudinal outcomes remain unanswered (Lysova et al., 2019; Thompson & Bunderson, 2019). In line with the 2023 call theme of “putting the worker front and center”, this symposium brings together an internationally-diverse group of scholars (Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and USA) to offer five original contributions of exceptional quality on both the nature of work as a calling and on its correlates. The symposium will begin with two qualitative studies followed by three quantitative studies that address knowledge gaps on the predictors, outcomes and relevance of calling that have been previously identified in reviews of the literature (Dobrow et al., 2019; Thompson & Bunderson, 2019) and in a special issue of the Journal of Vocational Behavior (Lysova et al., 2019). All questions that are addressed by these contributions are extremely timely and relevant for the theoretical development of the field, and help to understand the role of work as a calling in the current economy, which is characterized by an increase of flexible work arrangements and more frequent voluntary and involuntary job loss (Gulati, 2022; Spreitzer et al., 2017).