Hopeful Career State (HCS; Niles et al., 2021; Yoon et al., 2019) is an important construct that is defined as individuals’ levels of hopefulness towards their career futures in the present moment. Research has shown that individuals with high levels of hopeful career state tend to believe that their current experience and effort in education or work are assisting them with building a better career future. This construct has been associated with positive career outcomes, such as work engagement and job satisfaction, among employees in an organizational context.

One important area of future research is to investigate how HCS can be leveraged through various agentic HRD practices, including organizational onboarding practices, leadership development, and human agency. Additionally, there is a need to explore how social support from the organization and supervisors can further enhance employees’ HCS, which in turn can contribute to higher levels of work engagement, job satisfaction, and better work performance.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been used to empower HRD and OD to attain better people decisions by processing unprecedented amounts of data through self-learning algorithms.

However, the effectiveness of AI should not be the reason to shed the humanistic roots of the field.

Our lab continues to apply and innovate AI methodologies and critically assess their impact on the human agents at all levels in order to unleash human strengths in human-machine collaboration/interactions and ensure the fulfillment of fundamental human values such as trust, fairness, transparency, safety, and sustainability.

Our lab is committed to exploring and defining the core values that drive the field of Organization Development (OD). We recognize that OD is a values-based field, where our values drive how we engage with and support our clients. As such, we are actively involved in identifying and assessing OD values through a variety of means, such as the OD Gathering and international Delphi survey studies.

Our goal is to ensure that OD values are clearly defined, understood, and applied in our practice to guide our decisions and behaviors towards achieving the best outcomes for our clients. We believe that our work in defining and exploring OD values is crucial in advancing the field and ensuring its relevance in a rapidly changing world.

Here are some future research topics:

• Investigate the effect of applying the OD values on organizational performance
• Examine the impact of the OD values on individual and group behavior
• Assess the effectiveness of different approaches to teaching and promoting the OD values
• Investigate the interdependence and relationships between the OD values
• Examine the impact of cultural differences on the interpretation and application of the OD values
• Investigate the role of technology in promoting the OD values
• Assess the long-term impact of applying the OD values on organizational culture and sustainability

Our research direction on employee career development utilizes the Employee Career Development Integration (ECDI; Yoon et al., 2020; Yoon, 2022) model, which is a comprehensive review of the literature published in the last decade. The ECDI model maps 35 organizational career support practices (OCS) in five employee career development stages.

The stages are:

1. Exploration: Employees explore their interests, abilities, values, and career options.
2. Entry: Employees acquire knowledge, skills, and abilities required to perform their jobs.
3. Development: Employees focus on gaining advanced skills and experiences for further career development.
4. Mastery: Employees become experts in their roles and take on leadership positions.
5. Exit: Employees prepare to leave their current roles, either through retirement or transitioning to a new role within or outside the organization.

This model provides an explicit definition of the scope of OCS practices and helps organizations make decisions on what and when interventions should be adopted to facilitate employees moving forward to the next stage towards their career progressions. Our research also explores the responsibility of career development among the organization, the supervisor, and the employee, with studies showing that providing organizational career support practices and perceived supervisor support have significant correlations with employees’ hopeful career state. Supporting employees to be hopeful about their current and future careers leads to more engaged employees, less likelihood of them leaving the organization, and better job performance. It is everyone’s responsibility to thrive collectively.