This thesis focused on positive career goal discrepancies, informed by self-regulatory theories. A positive goal discrepancy is the individual's perception that current performance exceeds the set goal. Prior research has focused on understanding and finding solutions to negative career goal discrepancies (performance falls short of goals). However, understanding positive discrepancies is essential for improving young adults’ career development, where maximising and developing individual potential is one of the main goals. Positive and negative goal discrepancies are not simply opposites as they trigger different changes in the self-regulatory process and have different underlying mechanisms and boundary conditions. This thesis expanded research in the career literature by addressing three objectives: (a) to develop and validate a new scale to measure positive career goal discrepancy, (b) to assess the antecedents and outcomes of positive career goal discrepancy and test whether it provided an explanatory mechanism through which antecedents were related to cognitive and affective outcomes, and (c) to understand how changes in positive career goal discrepancy were related to adjustments in career goals and behaviours. These objectives were addressed through three empirical studies, which have been published in, or is currently under review with peer-reviewed journal. Participants for all studies were first-year university students from a collectivist cultural context (i.e., Indonesia). [...]