Answered and Unanswered Students’ Occupational Calling During Studying: Important for Their Well-being and Why?
Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: People who consider their work as a calling find it fulfilling, intrinsically rewarding, meaningful, and socially useful.Perceiving and living work as a calling is related to various positive work outcomes, both for the employee and the organization.Unfortunately, not all employees can live their calling at work due to various organizational or other contextual reasons.Unanswered calling leads to lower levels of well-being and job satisfaction.Although the construct of calling was mainly researched within the work settings, the perception of work as a life calling already exists among students during their studies.Research shows that calling is a salient construct for a substantial proportion of college students and is also related to higher levels of well-being.However, studies of unanswered calling in students are scarce.This study adds to the literature by exploring the role of both answered and unanswered calling in students.The aim of the study was to explore the relationship between students calling orientation, satisfaction of basic psychological needs, and well-being.A mediation model was proposed with basic psychological needs mediating the relationship between students answered and unanswered callings and academic satisfaction, students' burnout, and flourishing.Since calling is often associated with the teaching profession, our sample included 198 students (96.5% female), from the first to the fifth year of study at the Faculty of Teacher Education in Zagreb, Croatia.Self-report measures of unanswered and answered calling during studying (Unanswered Calling Scale, Answered Calling Scale), basic psychological needs (Student Psychological Needs Scale), academic satisfaction (Academic Satisfaction Scale), flourishing (Flourishing Scale) and students' burnout (School Burnout Inventory) were used.The findings of mediation analysis revealed that answered calling was positively related to satisfaction of basic psychological needs which in turn increased students flourishing and academic satisfaction, and decreased academic stress.Contrary to that, unanswered calling was negatively related to the satisfaction of basic psychological needs consequently to lower flourishing and academic satisfaction, and higher academic burnout.These results show that feeling that one's calling is answered while studying is important for both students' well-being and ill-being.The results also point to the importance of interventions aimed at helping students view their future jobs as a calling.Also, university teachers should be encouraged to cultivate factors that can help students to have their future work calling answered during their studies.
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4410354592