Abstract
Career adaptability is a psychosocial resource that can cope with current and anticipated vocational tasks, occupational transitions, work traumas in their occupational roles, and it raises new concern in the field of career psychology in recent years. How to reduce turnover has became a major concern for the managers. Many empirical researches have proved that career adaptability can predict turnover intention, however, the result was not the same. Maybe there is not a straight-line relationship between them, which means their relationship is affected by mediating variables or moderating variables. Until now, few studies have been made. Based on previous studies, career success is also closely related to turnover intention. Therefore, in the current study, we hypothesized that career adaptability affected turnover intention which was mediated by perceived internal marketability and perceived external marketability. Besides, career satisfaction played a moderating role between career adaptability and turnover intention.
A total sample of 193 employees from 11 different enterprises participated in the study, with 82 females and 111 males. The questionnaires included career adaptability questionnaire, career success questionnaire, and turnover intention questionnaire. All the questionnaires were well-established in the literature. SPSS23.0 and lisrel8.8 were adopted to perform a series of statistical analyses, and Andrew Hayes’ PROCESS macro for SPSS was employed to examine the moderation and mediation model, and Johnson -Neyman technique was used to quantify the moderation effect of career satisfaction.
The results indicated that: (1) After controlling on gender, education background and working-age, Both perceived internal marketability and perceived external marketability played the role of mediator in relationship between career adaptability and turnover intention in our multiple mediation model. Career adaptability not only directly affected turnover intention, but also reduced turnover intention by increasing perceived internal marketability or decreasing perceived external marketability. (2) Career satisfaction moderated the direct relationship between career adaptability and turnover intention. It also moderated the mediated path through perceived external marketability. Only when the employee's career satisfaction reached the middle or above level, their direct and indirect effects were both stronger. When the level of career satisfaction was low, this effect was not significant because employees' career satisfaction was lower and their turnover intention was all higher.
Therefore,the author concluded that perceived internal marketability and perceived external marketability were both played mediating role, and career satisfaction played a moderating role in the relationship between career adaptability and turnover intention. This study had three major contributions. First, the study provided a more comprehensive and elaborative interpretation to understand the mechanisms how and when career success affected turnover intention. Second, the findings provided a theoretical and empirical basis for other complex research, and therefore, it could expand related research. Last but not the least, this research could help to reduce turnover in the future. Managers should pay more attention to the employees with low career adaptability and career satisfaction. Then, the limitation of this study could not be ignored. The turnover is complicated. Career adaptability and career success could not fully explain it, thus this issue should be further studied in the future.
Key words
career adaptability /
career success /
marketability /
career satisfaction /
turnover
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Xiao-Li SHU.
The Relationship between Career Adaptability and Turnover: The Mediating and Moderating Role of Career Success[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2019, 42(1): 95-101
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