Understanding the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Career Development: Insights from Cultural Psychology

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has become a significant global crisis that requires individuals, organizations and nations to take necessary steps to cope. To develop a comprehensive and systematic understanding of the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on individuals' career development and possible coping strategies, we adopt a cultural psychological perspective to analyze: (1) how internalized cultural orientations (e.g., values, thinking styles, regulatory focus) may shape individual responses and coping strategies to COVID-19 pandemic; (2) how national culture influences the collective actions and norms during COVID-19 pandemic; (3) how to integrate insights from cultural psychology to enrich research on career management strategies in response to a fast changing environment. While this paper primarily focuses on the role of national culture (i.e., the shared meanings and practices in a nation), these discussions can largely be applied to other cultural settings. Practical implications are also discussed. Theories and research on individual coping (e.g., Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), self-regulation (e.g., Rothbaum, Weisz, & Snyder, 1982) and career transitions (e.g., Fouad & Bynner, 2008) are of great relevance to understand individual responses and reactions to emerging stressors associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. As humans are a cultural species, an investigation of the career implications of the COVID-19 also benefits from a cultural perspective. Theories and research from cultural psychology help to explain not only differences observed across cultures (e.g., Fouad, 2002; Fouad, Hansen, & Arias-Galicia, 1986; Hofstede, 1980; House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004) but also commonalities shared universally (e.g., Bond & Smith, 1996; Gelfand et al., 2011; Heine & Norenzayan, 2006; Kitayama, 2002; Oyserman & Lee, 2008). In this paper, we adopt a cultural psychological perspective to understand individuals' coping, self-regulation, and career management processes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We propose that, because members of a cultural group are socialized to endorse the shared cultural meanings (e.g., values, thinking styles), these cultural orientations will provide important guidance to their personal evaluations of stressors and choices of coping strategies. In addition, culture-directed collective actions and norms in response to the COVID-19 pandemic will serve as a top-down influence on individual members' behaviors. We then discuss how to integrate these insights from cultural psychology to enrich career management research and offer important future directions.