Career Resilience and Behavioral Outcomes: The Mediating Role of Anxiety and the Moderating Role of Organizational Trust

Career resilience refers to an individual’s capacity to adapt, persist, and remain effective when facing workplace challenges and disruptions. Although prior research has generally emphasized its uniformly positive effects, fewer studies have examined the conditions under which career resilience reduces negative emotional responses and leads to desirable work behaviors. This study tested a moderated mediation model in which organizational trust moderated the relationship between career resilience and anxiety, and the indirect effects of career resilience on workplace behaviors through anxiety. Data were collected from 229 full-time employees in South Korea across three waves with five-week intervals using a time-lagged design. Regression-based moderated mediation analyses revealed that the indirect effects of career resilience on task performance, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and deviant behavior via anxiety were conditional on organizational trust, supporting the hypothesized model. Career resilience reduced anxiety, and this reduction was associated with increased task performance and OCB while limiting deviant behavior. Organizational trust shaped this indirect process, suggesting that personal resources become particularly relevant when contextual resources are limited.