Abstract
Trait emotional intelligence (TEI) is emerging as a useful and promising individual difference in predicting vocational behavior (e.g., Di Fabio & Saklofske, 2014). Little is yet known about the underlying processes that may lead TEI to associate with career related outcomes. This study investigates the role of career adaptability in mediating the association between TEI and career decision-making difficulties and self-perceived employability, in a sample of Swiss university students (N = 400). The results of a series of path analysis in which we controlled for intelligence, sex and personality showed that career adaptability fully mediated the effect of TEI on self-perceived employability and career decision-making difficulties, in particular the subscales of lack of information and inconsistent information. Our findings shed light on the role of regulatory processes in shaping the effects of TEI on career-related outcomes.
Highlights
Our contemporary globalized world involves managing increasingly uncertain professional trajectories (Guichard, 2015), and career uncertainty is known to be associated with higher anxiety (Fuqua, Seaworth, & Newman, 1987)
We tested a full mediation model in which career adaptability fully mediated the relationship between trait emotional intelligence and career decision-making difficulties, after controlling for the effect of sex, intelligence, and personality traits on TEI and career adaptability
The comparison of the Chi-square test between the full mediation model and the partial mediation model indicated no significant differences, ∆χ2(1) = 3.53, p = .060, and supported a full mediation. This result highlights the importance of career adaptability in totally accounting for the relationship between TEI and career decision-making difficulties
Summary
Our contemporary globalized world involves managing increasingly uncertain professional trajectories (Guichard, 2015), and career uncertainty is known to be associated with higher anxiety (Fuqua, Seaworth, & Newman, 1987). In this context, a better understanding of one's emotional experience has been found to play an important role in career-related issues (e.g., Di Fabio & Saklofske, 2014). The aim of this study is to understand the pathway through which emotional self-perceptions representing the affective aspects of personality, i.e., trait emotional intelligence (TEI; Petrides, Pita, & Kokkinaki, 2007), may affect career related outcomes, such as career indecision and self-perceived employability. Regulatory processes have a strong adaptive function in allowing dispositions to fit the characteristics of the environment
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