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This article explores executive career decision-making at the later career stages, against a background of precarious employment and increasing longevity, and the consequent need, and difficulty, for older workers to sustain their careers for longer. We address a gap in the literature on the careers of later stage workers by exploring older executives' career options and demonstrating how a decision-making unit (DMU) of stakeholders actively participate in choosing between options, and which factors influence their choices. We furthermore highlight the key factors that can determine whether a career is sustainable, and the strategies that can optimize a career that is becoming unsustainable. We interviewed later stage executives and analyzed our interview data from the perspective of distributed decision-making for sustainable careers. We identified a range of decision-makers who contributed to the DMU at different levels for each decision, from proactively to reactively. Furthermore, we identified interacting strategies which could optimize the sustainability of a later stage career: personal, when individuals re-engaged actively with their careers; and contextual, when careers were reinvented by individuals and organizations. We synthesized these findings in a career sustainability matrix, designed to enable later stage workers to identify whether a career is sustainable, and how to extend career sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Planning is an everyday activity that is extended in timeand space, yet is frequently studied in the absence ofinteractivity. Successful planning relies on an array ofexecutive functions including self-control. Weinvestigated the effects of interactivity and self-controlon planning using a sequential-task paradigm. Half ofthe participants first completed a video-viewing taskrequiring self-control of visual attention, whereas theother half completed the same task without the self-control constraint. Next, and within each of thesegroups, half of the participants manipulated cards tocomplete their plan (high-interactivity condition); for theother half, plans were made with their hands down (low-interactivity condition). Planning performance wassignificantly better in the high- than in the low-interactivity conditions; however the self-controlmanipulation had no impact on planning performance.An exploration of individual differences revealed thatlong-term planning ability and non-planningimpulsiveness moderated the impact of interactivity onplanning. These findings suggest that interactivityaugments working memory resources and planningperformance, underscoring the importance of aninteractive perspective on planning research.

We examined whether the classical framing effect observedwith the Asian Disease problem could be reversed when peoplemake decisions from experience. Ninety-five universitystudents were randomly allocated to one of three conditions:Description, Sampling (where the participants were allowed tosample through the outcomes presented as a pack of cards) andInteractive (where the participants were invited to spread outall possible outcomes in a sample) and made three gain-framedchoices and three loss-framed choices, with two filler tasksafter the first three choices. The results revealed a significantinteraction effect between framing and choice condition. In theDescription choice condition, participants were more risk-seeking with loss-framed problems. This pattern was reversedin the Sampling choice condition where participants were morerisk-seeking with gain frames. Finally, the Interactive choicecondition resulted in a classic pattern of framing effect,whereby people were more risk averse in the domain of gains.

This interdisciplinary research explored how executives make decisions which shape their career trajectories and sustain their careers. We selected executives so that our sample would consist of decision-makers with sufficient capital resources to support a range of career choices. In our analysis we applied a recent framework of distributed interactive decision-making, which proposes that decisions are shared interactions between personal and contextual agents. We conducted 40 semi-structured interviews with executives who are MBA Alumni of a leading global business school to investigate how they made their career decisions. We conducted thematic analysis using NVivo qualitative analysis software to identify the decision-makers in each decision and their levels of agentic participation. Our results reveal that: (1) (a) executive career decision-making is distributed between the person and a range of active stakeholders in their career context, and (b) stakeholders along with influences together form a decision-making unit (DMU), whose composition changes according to the circumstances; (2) each member of the DMU may participate at a different level in each career decision, along an interactive continuum which ranges from proactive decision-making, driven by the individual, to reactive decision-making, driven by other decision-makers in the career context. These findings have implications for individuals, career counselors and human resource managers: we identify the DMU of various participants in career decisions and their level of active contribution to the decision outcomes, in order to develop sustainable career management strategies and processes. This is original interdisciplinary research, combining and applying recent theories of distributed decision-making for the first time in empirical research into sustainable careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use self-determination theory to extend the conceptual understanding of flu vaccine hesitancy among health professionals. The scale sheds light on the role played by motivational factors above and beyond traditional cognitive factors such as biased risk judgements and health beliefs. Across five phases using data from 718 healthcare professionals we establish factor structure, reliability, discriminant, convergent, criterion-related, incremental validity, and measurement invariance of the Treatment Self-Regulation Questionnaire assessing healthcare professionals' motivation for flu vaccination scale (TSRQ-Flu). In addition to the four factors of the TSRQ-Flu (autonomous, introjection, external and amotivation regulations), we assess intentions to vaccinate, past vaccination behaviour and validate the scale using measures of cognitive empowerment, vaccine attitudes and social desirability. Our findings indicate that the newly developed 11-item scale is distinct from and contributes over and beyond other psychosocial measures of flu vaccination intentions and can be used to understand the motivation of both vaccinated and not-vaccinated healthcare professionals. This new scale has the potential to make a marked change in the conceptualisation of the roots of vaccine hesitancy among healthcare professionals and aid healthcare managers in developing evidence-based interventions to promote vaccination among their staff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Insight is commonly viewed as originating from the restructuring of a mental representation. Distributed cognition frameworks such as the Systemic Thinking Model (SysTM, Vallée-Tourangeau and Vallée-Tourangeau, Cognition beyond the brain: interactivity and human thinking, pp 133–154, 2017), however, assumes that information processing can be transformed when it is distributed across mental and material resources. The experiments reported here investigated whether interactivity enhanced incubation effects with the cheap necklace problem. Participants attempted to solve the problem in a low-interactivity condition with pen and paper or in a high-interactivity condition with a set of metal chains. Performance was substantially better in a task environment that fostered a higher degree of interactivity at Time 1. There was evidence of an incubation effect as participants significantly improved in performance after a 2-week gap, particularly in the high-interactivity condition. Experiment 2 showed that the context within which people can enact their thinking following incubation is key to improve problem-solving performance. When the problem presentation changed after a 2-week gap (low interactivity to high interactivity or high interactivity to low interactivity), performance only improved for those who worked on a highly interactive task at Time 2. Taken together, these findings underscore the importance of adopting a systemic perspective when investigating incubation effects in problem solving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]