Using protean career attitude to facilitate a positive approach to unemployment

Abstract

The rise in unemployment rates associated with the global financial crisis mean that a timely understanding is needed of the ways in which a person's career attitude influences their reactions to job loss. Much of the research into unemployment has focused on what people lose during unemployment rather than what people can potentially gain during unemployment. In this paper, we deliberately adopt a “positive deviance” (Marsh et al., British Medical Journal, 329:1177—1179, 2004) to unemployment and study the attitudes and behaviors that enable people to find successful solutions during job loss. Specifically, we suggest that protean career attitude is a positive factor that can be built upon ..