Navigating careers at sea: Career proactivity in extreme work contexts

Abstract

Extreme work contexts are characterized by highly demanding labor under intense, stressful, and risky conditions. The literature has to date been predominantly focused on operational, organizational, and institutional responses to these challenges. Consequently, scant attention has been paid to how individuals understand and respond to extreme work contexts when managing their careers. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 33 Iranian merchant ship officers and developed a grounded theory model of career proactivity in extreme work contexts. Our model delineates two stages leading to proactive career behaviors: The first stage is sensemaking, where individuals wake up to the challenges of their extreme work context, engage in comparative elaboration, and arrive at a settled understanding of the extremity of their work context. The second stage is agency, where individuals engage in experimentation of when they can modify situations or adapt to them, which ultimately helps them choose one of the following proactive career behaviors: exit planning, job crafting, career drifting, and job embracing. To support the generalizability of our model, we interviewed nine firefighters, which confirmed the model's applicability to another extreme context. We discuss the theoretical and critical implications of our model for recent conversations in extreme context research and career research.