Exploring teachers’ career self-management. Considering the roles of organizational career management,occupational self-efficacy,and learning goal orientation.

The current study examines how organizational career management – i.e. activities undertaken by schools in order to plan and manage teachers’ careers – relates to teachers’ career self-management – i.e. teachers steering their careers by means of searching for opportunities, networking, or seeking supervisory support. Moreover, it examines the mediating roles of occupational self-efficacy and learning goal orientation in this relationship. Mediation analysis in SPSS, using the PROCESS macro of survey data from 220 Dutch secondary school teachers, showed that positive relationships between organizational career management and career self-management were mediated by occupational self-efficacy and learning goal orientation.     

Supporting temporary agency workers’ affective commitments: exploring the role of opportunities for competence development

Nowadays, many organizations employ parts of their workforce via employment agencies and, as such, temporary agency workers (TAWs) are important for our economies. Increasingly, research is conducted to explore the relationships among the three parties involved – the TAW, the client organization and employment agency – and how this relationship can be strengthened by HR instruments. This study adds to this stream of literature by studying to what extent TAWs’ affective commitment (AC) towards the client organization and employment agency relates to their expectations and their fulfilled expectations regarding offered opportunities for competence development (OfCD) by both organizations, and by exploring to what extent TAWs regard both employment organizations responsible for offering them OfCD. A cross-sectional survey study was conducted among TAWs in the Netherlands (n = 449), including quantitative and qualitative analyses. All results of this study together revealed that TAWs tend to be focused on the client organization with regard to OfCD. This is the organization to which they feel most affectively committed, that they regard responsible for organizing their OfCD, and where they ask for OfCD. This study indicated that TAWs do not yet profit maximally from the triangular employment relationship, and have a rather traditional view on TAW constructions.     

HR policies and practices in vocational education and training institutions: understanding the implementation gap through the lens of discourses

Vocational education and training (VET) institutions face serious challenges, like educational innovations and upcoming teacher shortages, which require them to invest in their human capital. However, the implementation of human resources (HR) policies and practices often stagnates. Using the Dutch VET sector as an exemplary case, we show that the implementation gap can be understood by employing a discourse perspective. The distinction between a control vs. a commitment approach to HR served as a lens through which we analysed how actors at state and school level perceived the goals, necessity and features of HR policy. The results reveal no contradictions between actors concerning the goal of HR. Contradictions are, however, found related to the way in which HR should be shaped and implemented. Teachers and managers think governments’ view about HR is too much control oriented and that commitment strategies have to be added for HR to be effective.