Disintegrated: How the Psychology of Vocation Can Integrate Your Faith & Work

How do you integrate your faith with your work? This is a key question for Christians who want their faith to impact far more than how they spend Sunday mornings. It’s an easy question to ask, but not always so easy to answer. The Bible offers many stories, directives, themes, and insights that help us answer this question. Accordingly, pastors, theologians, and business types have spilled a lot of ink exploring such things. In fact, back in 2002, Intervarsity Press published an annotated bibliography that summarized hundreds of such resources.[1] Since then, the number of Christian books on the topic has only continued to proliferate. I believe Christians would benefit from these kinds of books; I have personally found a good many of them to be extremely helpful in my own life. At the same time, it is worth acknowledging that God offers more answers to this question than are outlined in Christian books, or even the Bible.

The Two Books of God’s Revelation

­I don’t mean to blaspheme in that last sentence. Indeed, I affirm that Scripture should always be our starting point for finding answers to the challenging questions of life. Scripture is God’s special revelation, his revealed Word. However, the Bible is not God’s only revelation. He also makes himself known through his creation, his general revelation. These “two books” work hand-in-hand. For example, if you’re a doctor, the Bible can help you understand that God is the Great Physician who values life, but it won’t teach you the latest surgical techniques for managing prostate cancer. Yet when you learn such things during your residency, you are learning about God as revealed in the way he designed the human body and orchestrated technological advances to help facilitate the healing process. Or if you are a biologist, the Bible can help you understand that God created and sustains all things, but that knowledge alone won’t help you map the Human Genome. In studying DNA, though, you are “thinking God’s thoughts after him,” and the process may well draw you closer to him, leaving a moving sense of awe and wonder, as it did for Francis Collins.

Psychology, Faith, and Your Job

The “two books” notion applies also to the question of how Christians can approach their career decision-making. The vast majority of the hundreds of Christian books on the topic of faith and work provide rich theological understandings of vocation drawn from the pages of Scripture, with emphases ranging from creation to curse, kingdom to end-times.

But there is also a “psychology of vocation,” containing the results of thousands of studies that have applied the methods of science to understand the factors that influence effective career decision-making. This is my field of study and—I’m embarrassed to say—despite the wealth of wisdom it has generated, its findings have barely seemed to register in the faith and work discussion. This is a shame because I view it as God’s revelation in the same way that a physician would learn about God in medical school and a biologist would learn about God by investigating DNA.

In vocational psychology, the subject matter is the work-related behavior exhibited by the pinnacle of his creation: people.

What has science (in this case, psychology) taught us about how best to approach career decision-making? The answer is “a lot.” For a more detailed discussion (shameless plug alert!), check out Make Your Job a Calling: How the Psychology of Vocation Can Change Your Life at Work, the book I co-authored with Dr. Ryan Duffy. This article, along with two others to follow in the coming weeks, serves as a tip-of-the-iceberg summary of the many resources available.

What is a Vocational Psychologist?

Vocational psychologists, in general, are very interested in two things: data and practical application. We like data—the results of scientific studies, including those that specifically investigate perceiving and living a calling. Data offer a close-to-objective means of examining the truth of claims that people make about how to find and create meaning in their work. All data are potentially useful, but those data that translate into practical application matter most. Vocational psychologists read research studies and conduct research themselves in part because of curiosity and in part because we covet information that can be used to help people make wise decisions about their careers, such as in career counseling. The “psychology of vocation” is broad; consider the phrase an umbrella under which falls research on calling and meaningful work specifically, as well as career choice and development.

Research on Vocation or Calling

Research that specifically investigates the notion of work as a calling is very new and rapidly growing, with the number of published social science studies on the topic increasing tenfold within the last decade. As it applies to their careers, Christians usually view a calling as a summons from God to use their gifts in ways that advance His kingdom. In psychology, the definitions are broader, but capture the psychological components embedded in how Christians think of the concept. For example, in my own work, I focus on people’s perception of a “transcendent summons” to do purposeful, meaningful work that benefits others or promotes the common good.

Measuring One’s Calling

To conduct research on calling, psychologists have designed ways to measure the extent to which people feel they have a calling. They administer these measures to people and also measure other attitudes (like job satisfaction or happiness) to see if and how they are related to a sense of calling. So far, research on calling has revealed the following:

1. A sense of calling is surprisingly prevalent.

Across many samples of students and employees, anywhere from one-third to two-thirds indicate that the concept of calling is relevant to how they view their work.

2. A sense of calling is associated with positive career development outcomes.

Research has shown that people with a calling are more confident that they can make good decisions about their careers, more committed to their jobs and organizations, more intrinsically motivated and engaged, and more satisfied with their jobs.

3. A sense of calling is associated with general well-being.

People with callings (compared with other people) are happier, more satisfied with life, cope more effectively with challenges, and express a stronger sense of meaning and purpose in their lives.

4. It’s not about having it; it’s about living it.

People who feel that they have a calling are happiest, most committed, and experience the most benefit when they are working in a job in which they feel they are able to express their calling and live it out. Unfortunately, some people who sense that they have a calling have trouble finding opportunities to express it, and as a result, feel frustrated, discouraged, and unhappy.

5. A sense of calling has some drawbacks, too.

People willingly make tough sacrifices to pursue their callings, and sometimes trade some types of satisfaction and well-being (e.g., material wealth and comfort) for others (the sense that one is making a meaningful difference in the world). A sense of calling can also sometimes make individuals vulnerable to problems like workaholism, burnout, poor work-family balance, and exploitation by unscrupulous employers.

Research on Career Choice and Development

Research specifically on calling is just a drop in a very large bucket of scholarship on career choice and development, dating back more than a century. Often, the field is traced to Frank Parsons, whose posthumously published book Choosing a Vocation hit the shelves in 1909.

[Click here to download a free digital version of Choosing a Vocation.–The Table.]

Parsons advocated gaining a clear sense of one’s self and a clear sense of the opportunities that are available in the world of work before using “true reasoning” to find a good match between person and job. This deceptively simple “person-environment fit” model, as it turns out, is well supported by dozens of research studies. It also forms the basis of a good strategy for discerning one’s calling.

A Successful Career Doesn’t Happen in a Vacuum

Career development theorists in later generations recognized that career decisions do not happen in a vacuum, but in the context of a life. And lives are complicated. People have all kinds of commitments and responsibilities; some are central and some exist on the fringes, but all change and fluctuate over time. People also change and so do circumstances, along with economies and occupational fields. These are never static. All of this needs to be taken into account when one seeks to identify, develop, and live out a calling in work, among other callings in other spheres of life.

Finally, vocational psychologists have come to recognize that building successful careers, however that is understood, requires more than simply having the requisite talent, motivation, and opportunity. A successful career also requires the consistent belief that one can do what is required well and that doing what is required actually leads to outcomes that matter. Not only that, but when facing obstacles, individuals have the capacity (to the extent that external constraints allow) to mold and shape their work into something that encourages, facilitates, and provides a means of living out their callings.

So What?: Applying Vocational Psychology to Make Career Decisions

Knowing that there is a psychology of vocation is useful context, but how can this help you when it comes to actually making career decisions or making the most out of your current job? In other words, how can vocational psychology help you answer the questions “How should I discern my calling?” and “How can I make my current job more meaningful?” In the two posts that follow, I’ll address these questions head-on.

Bryan Dik is associate professor of counseling psychology at Colorado State University and is co-founder and is Chief Science Officer for jobZology. He is co-author of Make Your Job a Calling: How the Psychology of Vocation Can Change Your Life at Work.