Employee’ Professional Adaptabilities: Measurement And Influencing Mechanism

Professional adaptabilities are the theries of specific abilities of a employee to solve the main practical problems derived from the process of the career development, namely, the ability of integrating into corporate, the ability of communicating with job-related persons, the ability of learning for professional advances, the ability of regulating one’s emotions, and the ability of transforming one’s careers.The professional adaptabilities are the very important psychological Indices which reflect one’s career development situations under the conditions of hard times and fierce competitions.In view of the popular used concept of career adaptabilities and the scale established by Savickas, are inappropriate for measuring professional adaptabilities, and the research in the field, is rather weak and unsystematic. this thesis, is aimed to develop a suitable measuring instrument on the basis of a qualitative study, so as to apply the multistage nested model design and the hierarchical structural equation model method, to explore the influencing mechanism of professional adaptabilities, using a sample of1387employees among30corporations.The whole study is divided into five parts:In the first study,68participants were recruited in a structured interview or an open questionnaire survey, to answer the following two questions,"what are the main problems faced in the employee’career development?", and "what abilities do they need to solve these problems?" All the original statements of the participants were coded into categories, and then all the categories were abstracted and generalized into the themes, finally it is constructed into five dimensions of professional adaptabilities.The aim of the second study, is to develop a measuring instrument of professional adaptabilities, which consists of five dimensions:integrating into corporate, communicating with job-related persons, learning for professional advances, regulating one’s emotions, and transforming one’s careers. After all the items were compiled, preliminary tested, revises, and retested, internal consistency reliability, retest reliability, split-half reliability, content validity, construct validity and empirical validity were successively tested.The aim of the third study, is to describe and infer the statistical characteristics of the employee’s professional adaptabilities. Through a large sample of employees from enterprises with different properties, industries and development stages, data collected were be carried analysis of overall descriptive statistics first, and then the variance testing and contrast within levels of all the demographic variables or the subjects characteristic variables.The aim of the fouth study, is to explore the main orgnizational and individual factors influencing the employee’s career development. Using multistage nested model design, all the direct and indirect effects of hierarchical structural equation models and multiple sequence mediation models were tested successively with such the dependent variables as psychological capital, proactive personality, big five personalities, job characteristics, organizational support and organizational culture.The aim of the fifth study, is to test the impacts of professional adaptabilities on the individuals’quality of working life. Two models were tested successively, one of which contains job stress, job satisfaction and organizational commitment as outcome variables of working quality, the other of which contains work-family conflict and stress responses as outcome variables of life quality.The main conclusions are as followed.1. The professional adaptabilities of corporation employees included five dimensions, they were the ability of integrating into corporate, the ability of communicating with job-related persons, the ability of learning for professional advances, the ability of regulating one’s emotions, and the ability of transforming one’s careers. The self-report inventory of the professional adaptabilities had good reliabilities and good validities.The five subscales could be used separately or used in combination.2. The characteristics of corporate culture had not merely a positive and obvious direct influence on the professional adaptabilities, but also a obvious indirect influence on them through organizational support, job characteristics, and proactive personality. 3. Organizational support, also, had not merely a positive and obvious direct influence on the professional adaptabilities, but also a obvious indirect influence on them through job characteristics and proactive personality.4. Job characteristics had not merely a positive and obvious direct influence on the professional adaptabilities, but also a obvious indirect influence on them through proactive personality.5. The transactional psychological capital, the relational psychological capital and proactive personality had a positive and obvious influence on the professional adaptabilities.6. Employees’ professional abilities had a positive and obvious direct influence on employee’s job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Job satisfaction plays a partial mediating role between them.7. The employee’s professional adaptabilities had a negative impact on anxiety, depression and anger, but work-family conflict had a positive impact on anxiety, depression and anger, and work-family conflict played a moderating role between professional adaptabilities and anxiety, depression and anger.Innovations in this study are as follows:1. In terms of the research perspective and the research contents, this study explored a local measuring instrument in order to construct a integrated theoretical influence factor model of professional abilities on the basis of hierarchical linear model analysis.2. In terms of the research methods, using the multi-stage nested model design, hierarchical structural equation model was used to explore appropriate models and theoretical integration.