Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, OH, USA.
Front Psychol. 2014 Dec 8;5:1400. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01400. eCollection 2014.
This study examines how personal vision enhances work engagement and the retention of women in the engineering profession. Using a mixed method approach to understand the factors related to the retention of women in the engineering profession, we first interviewed women who persisted and women who opted out of the profession (Buse and Bilimoria, 2014). In these rich stories, we found that women who persisted had a personal vision that included their profession, and that this personal vision enabled them to overcome the bias, barriers and discrimination in the engineering workplace. To validate this finding on a larger population, we developed a scale to measure one's personal vision conceptualized as the ideal self (Boyatzis and Akrivou, 2006). The measure was tested in a pilot study and then used in a study of 495 women with engineering degrees. The findings validate that the ideal self is comprised of self-efficacy, hope, optimism and core identity. For these women, the ideal self directly impacts work engagement and work engagement directly impacts career commitment to engineering. The findings add to extant theory related to the role of personal vision and intentional change theory. From a practical perspective, these findings will aid efforts to retain women in engineering and other STEM professions.
这项研究探讨了个人愿景如何增强女性在工程专业中的工作投入度和留任率。本研究采用混合方法，首先对坚持从事该行业的女性和退出该行业的女性进行了访谈（Buse 和 Bilimoria，2014），以了解与女性在工程专业留任相关的因素。在这些丰富的故事中，我们发现，坚持从事该行业的女性有一个包含其职业的个人愿景，而这种个人愿景使她们能够克服工程工作场所中的偏见、障碍和歧视。为了在更大的人群中验证这一发现，我们开发了一个衡量个人愿景的量表，将其概念化为理想自我（Boyatzis 和 Akrivou，2006）。该衡量工具在一项试点研究中进行了测试，然后在一项针对 495 名具有工程学位的女性的研究中使用。研究结果验证了理想自我由自我效能感、希望、乐观和核心身份组成。对于这些女性来说，理想自我直接影响工作投入度，工作投入度直接影响对工程的职业承诺。该研究结果丰富了与个人愿景和意图改变理论相关的现有理论。从实际的角度来看，这些发现将有助于努力留住女性从事工程和其他 STEM 职业。
