Postdoctoral Fellowship: SPRF: Improving Employment Outcomes for Military Veterans: Translation of Structure into Success

Under the sponsorship of Dr. Aaron Kay at Duke University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist studying employment transition among military veterans. This project seeks to improve the well-being of veterans as they transition from military to civilian careers. Many veterans face significant challenges in this transition, which can lead to difficulties in finding and maintaining satisfying employment, impacting their mental health and overall quality of life. This research develops and tests a practical intervention designed to help veterans better adapt to civilian work environments by understanding how they perceive structure in their new jobs. By translating psychological science into actionable strategies, this work aims to provide a widely accessible tool that can be used by organizations to facilitate smoother transitions and promote lasting success for those who have served. The proposed research addresses the problem that the highly structured environment of military service contrasts sharply with often less-structured civilian workplaces, which can lead to a sense of lost control and difficulties for transitioning veterans. Drawing on Compensatory Control Theory, this project theorizes that individuals strive to perceive their environment as orderly, especially when facing changes, and that this perception helps them regain a sense of personal control. The research goals include 1) developing a new measure to comprehensively assess perceived organizational structure, 2) using this measure to experimentally assess the relationship between different forms of employment structure and positive employment outcomes, and 3) using this understanding to create an intervention designed to improve employment outcomes for transitioning veterans. The scope of the work involves multiple studies that will first identify how different forms of perceived structure are associated with improved subjective outcomes in the workplace for veterans. Subsequent studies will experimentally test the effects of these structural perceptions and longitudinally examine an intervention designed to enhance positive employment outcomes. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.