Career Barriers And Coping Strategies Of Female MBA Students

With the development of society, more and more female enter the working field; and recently, the concept of the"glass ceiling"has achieved the status of a well enshrined phenomenon. Similarly, most Chinese female also encounter to this kind of hindrance when trying for further development in career. This made the concept of"career barriers"received attention generally.The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship among career barriers, career motivation and coping strategies of female MBA students. Through the result from questionnaires, it is found that female MBA students have high career barriers and career motivation, they are more likely to use logic-thinking coping strategies and less likely to use emotion-avoiding coping strategies. And female MBA students with different background are different in career barriers, career motivation and coping strategies. In addition, the results of two-way MANOVA and path analysis show that, female MBA students with high career barriers are more likely to use support-seeking coping strategies, and female MBA students with high career motivation are more likely to use all kinds of positive coping strategies. Furthermore, the students with higher barriers of background/situation use logic-thinking coping strategies more frequently; the students with higher barriers of society/interpersonal use problem-solving coping strategies less frequently; the students with higher barriers of individual/mentality use emotion-avoiding coping strategies less frequently. Female MBA students with higher career insight use emotion-adjusting coping strategies more frequently and use emotion-avoiding coping strategies less frequently; and the students with higher career identity use logic-thinking coping strategies more frequently. Therefore, London's emotion/cognition-based model of coping with career barriers is partially confirmed in this study.At the end of this study, implications and suggestions for female employees, enterprises and future researches were provided.