Dr Lanyue Fan

In today’s complex and fast-changing business environment, being an effective leader often means being adaptable. This chapter explains how leader self-complexity, the level of complexity and richness of how you see yourself as a leader, can enhance your adaptability. We also discuss how diversifying career experiences can foster this self-complexity. To facilitate your development, the chapter presents two self-assessment tools. These tools enable you to evaluate your own level of leader self-complexity and your career experiences, helping you to better understand your unique characteristics. We provide guidance to develop a personalized plan to enhance your adaptability. The insights and strategies outlined in this chapter are instrumental not only for individual leadership development but also for those seeking to promote leadership growth within their organizations.

In this study, we aim to examine how socialization practices predict newcomers' career adaptability during their organizational transitions. Drawing on career construction theory and conservation of resources theory, we argue that newcomers' job embeddedness, as predicted by their perceived organizational socialization tactics, positively predicts their career adaptability during career transitions. We investigate the role of past transition experiences (i.e., career variety) in moderating the relationship between job embeddedness and career adaptability. Data were collected at three time points from 492 newcomers in an information technology company in China. The newcomers' perceived organizational socialization tactics (i.e., training, future prospects and coworker support) positively predicted their job embeddedness, which was positively associated with their career adaptability. Additionally, career variety weakened the positive effect of job embeddedness on career adaptability. Furthermore, career variety moderated the indirect effects of future prospects and coworker support on career adaptability via job embeddedness, but not that of training. We conclude the article with discussions of our theoretical and practical contributions.

This article is part of the 50th anniversary issue of the Journal of Vocational Behavior (JVB), with a focus on person-environment (P-E) fit. P-E fit has been a central research area in vocational and organizational psychology. With a focus on highly influential work in both fields, this article aims to synthesize P-E fit literature and develop theoretical models to guide future research. First, we summarize key perspectives and the state of the art in the general P-E fit literature. Second, based on a succinct review of P-E fit papers published in JVB, we take an interdisciplinary approach to critically discuss the conceptual and methodical ambiguities in this area. Third, we integrate identity and social exchange theories to present an Identity-Capability-Reward (ICR) model to conceptualize P-E fit across job roles and work entities at different levels. Fourth, we draw upon self-regulation and life-span development perspectives to propose a cybernetic development model that theorizes the self-regulated changes of fit experiences across time. We conclude with recommendations for an integrative, dynamic, and developmental approach to advance the P-E fit theories.

In a complex and dynamic business world, effective leadership requires adaptability. Researchers have long recognized the importance of leader self-complexity in enhancing this adaptability. However, the underlying mechanisms by which leader self-complexity affects adaptability remain unclear. Furthermore, current theories and empirical studies on leader self-complexity mainly emphasize its advantages in facilitating leadership adaptability, while often overlooking potential costs. This research employs conservation of resources theory to uncover two distinct processes linking leader self-complexity to adaptability: a cognitive pathway (i.e., cognitive flexibility) and an affective pathway (i.e., role conflict and well-being), thereby exploring its dual effects. Data were collected from 330 US leaders at three time points. The results demonstrated that different components of leader self-complexity influenced adaptability via cognitive and affective pathways differently. The number of leadership roles did not show any significant positive or negative effect on adaptability through either pathway. Differentiation among roles increased role conflict and decreased well-being, which in turn negatively influenced cognitive flexibility and adaptability. Conversely, integration among roles showed positive effects on adaptability through both pathways.

This research examined in China two types of parental minimization reactions toadolescents' negative emotions: Devaluing/invalidating that degrades the significanceof adolescents' emotions (thereby invalidating adolescents' feelings) versus discounting/mitigating that downplays the seriousness of the situations (thereby mitigatingadolescents' emotional arousals). Study 1 had 777 adolescents (389 females; meanage = 12.79 years) complete a survey; Study 2 had 233 adolescents (111 females; meanage = 12.19 years) complete a survey twice spanning around 6 months. Study 1 showedadolescents' perceived maternal devaluing/invalidating and discounting/mitigatingreactions as two distinct factors, with different patterns of associations with othersupportive versus nonsupportive parenting practices. Study 2 showed that over time,adolescents' perceived maternal devaluing/invalidating reactions predicted their dampenedsocioemotional functioning; discounting/mitigating reactions predicted their enhancedfunctioning.