Scale Validation of Career Crafting in the Chinese Context and Its Impact on Individuals' Learned Helplessness: The Mediating Role of Resilience and the Moderating Role of Gender

ABSTRACT

Against the backdrop of an increasingly complex career development environment, growing career mobility brings both opportunities and challenges to individuals' career advancement: although it expands possibilities for pursuing ideal career paths, it also exacerbates career insecurity and triggers negative psychological states such as learned helplessness. More notably, women also face multiple barriers stemming from societal expectations and workplace constraints, making them more vulnerable to learned helplessness. Career crafting offers a valuable perspective for individuals to build fulfilling careers and alleviate negative emotions, yet existing research has primarily focused on its positive impacts on career‐related and work‐related outcomes, with limited attention paid to the mechanisms that mitigate individuals' negative emotional states. Furthermore, career‐related research must take cultural contexts into account, yet all current scales have been developed based on Western contexts. Therefore, this study addresses these gaps through two separate studies: Study 1, drawing on existing Western scales, validated a localized Chinese career crafting scale via translation and multi‐sample testing ( N 1 = 335, N 2 = 267, N 3 = 246). Study 2 examined the mechanism of career crafting on learned helplessness via resilience using two‐wave longitudinal data ( N  = 306). Furthermore, gender plays a significant moderating role in this indirect pathway, revealing that women gain greater benefits from engaging in career crafting than men. This study not only provides a reliable measurement for career crafting research in the Chinese context and enriches the relevant empirical literature but also clarifies the mediating mechanism of resilience and the boundary condition of gender, extending the application of conservation of resource theory and gender role theory to career research. Practically, it offers targeted guidance for individuals, especially women, to accumulate psychological resources, improve adaptive capacity, and proactively shape their career trajectories while coping with negative emotions.