Abstract
In order to deepen the understanding of the personality antecedents of students’ career decidedness, this study, based on social cognitive career theory and career development theory, examined the effect of proactive personality on career decidedness as well as the mediating mechanism and moderating factors in this process. The results of the survey of 783 Chinese college students showed that proactive personality was positively related to career decidedness via career exploration, and anticipated regret moderated the relationship between proactive personality and career exploration significantly. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed at the end of this research.
Highlights
As college students are facing the transition from school to work, they need to make careerrelated preparations, which requires them to proactively carry out career management (Hirschi et al, 2013)
Proactive personality as a compound personality is proved to be a useful framework on the dispositional basis of career decidedness
This study demonstrates that the future career choice of individuals with proactive personality will be clearer and more committed through career exploration, which is consistent with the logic of Cai et al.’s (2015) study, that is, individuals with proactive personality will have a clearer cognition of future goals or orientations via career exploration
Summary
As college students are facing the transition from school to work, they need to make careerrelated preparations, which requires them to proactively carry out career management (Hirschi et al, 2013). Previous study has shown that when students have a higher level of career decidedness, they are more motivated to seek internships and are more likely to succeed in securing internships (Hirschi and Läge, 2008). The Big Five model of personality has been proved to be the antecedents of career decidedness, but its effect size is not very large. Proactive personality is the dispositional basis for individuals to take proactive actions (Bateman and Crant, 1993), and researchers believe that it is an effective complement to the existing personality theories, because compared with the Big Five model of personality, proactive personality is related to personal career development (Major et al, 2006), previous studies have shown that proactive personality can improve students’ career
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