5.1. Theoretical Implications
Our study makes several contributions to the literature on self-perceived employability and career success. First, based on COR perspective, our study showed that self-perceived employability as an important personal resource was important for sustainable career development even during the pandemic. It enhances individual productivity and health at work [
9]. Self-perceived employability helps individuals withstand the stress posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and keeps them from emotional exhaustion and to stay engaged with their work. This expanded the existing understanding on employability’s role in a regular context to an unusual and challenging time like the pandemic as contributing to employment during career transitions [
10].
In terms of improving productivity, self-perceived employability as a critical personal resource contributes to work engagement [
13,
23]. Our results find a relatively large total effect of self-perceived employability on work engagement (total effect = 0.67). This finding contributes to the work engagement literature in showing that self-perceived employability is a critical antecedent of work engagement that should not be ignored in the future. In terms of psychological health, the relatively well-established negative effect of self-perceived employability on emotional exhaustion turned out to be small (total effect = −0.10). This may be due to the contextual nature of the pandemic. The stress caused by a crisis like pandemic is uncontrollable and unpredictable, thus personal resources can only protect individuals from emotional exhaustion to a limited extent [
10]. Nevertheless, self-perceived employability can help individuals remain engaged with their work despite emotional exhaustion. Future studies can examine whether the same conclusions still stand in a non-crisis context.
Second, past studies did not specify the mechanism of the effect of self-perceived employability on emotional exhaustion [
4,
7], and our study established that the impact of self-employability on emotional exhaustion is partially mediated by stress coping style. Specifically, consistent with our hypothesis, people with high self-perceived employability tend to significantly adopt higher level of positive coping style, which is problem-oriented [
29]. As a result, they experience decreased level of emotional problems triggered by challenges [
30]. In other words, positive coping style mediated the negative relationship between self-perceived employability and emotional exhaustion and the indirect effect is negative. The result confirms that self-perceived employability, acting the role of personal resource, will impact individuals’ adoption of positive coping and in turn prevent negative emotions.
Contrary to our expectation that individuals with resources were less likely to avoid the problem by adopting a negative coping style and, thus, leading to lower emotional exhaustion [
25,
27], self-perceived employability’s effect on negative coping style was positive in our study. Nevertheless, negative coping style was positively related to emotional exhaustion as expected. As a result, we found a positive indirect effect of self-perceived employability and emotional exhaustion through negative coping style. In other words, a negative coping style suppresses the positive role of self-perceived employability in preventing emotional exhaustion [
53]. This result is surprising and may be due to the specific context of a pandemic. When facing enormous stress in situations like the pandemic, individuals may resort to all the possible ways of coping, the negative ones included [
54]. Individuals of high self-perceived employability who were more resourceful were in a better position to mobilize all the coping strategies and a negative coping style that focused on dealing with one’s own emotions may then be a practical alternative [
30]. As a result, self-perceived employability’s effect on negative coping style was also positive and a negative coping style in turn led to higher emotional exhaustion. We expect that in less challenging situations, the suppression effect will not be found [
29]. Future studies in a non-pandemic time should be conducted to further examine this relationship. The suppression effect of a negative effect found in our study suggest that during challenging times like the pandemic, employers should also pay attention to support individuals with high self-perceived employability to help them avoid using a negative coping style. Otherwise, self-perceived employability may harm the employees’ emotional well-being through negative coping style [
28,
30].
Third, our study proposes and establishes the mediating role of career commitment in the effect of self-perceived employability on work engagement. This extends the outcome of employability to include career commitment and also contributes to the career commitment literature by adding employability as an antecedent [
3,
4]. Individuals of high self-perceived employability have a higher sense of control related to work and, thus, are more likely to make sustained efforts when faced with obstacles [
34,
55]. They also have higher outcome expectations about continuous investment in their career of choice. High career commitment in turn leads to higher work engagement, with a medium path coefficient (0.34). This is consistent with contemporary self-driven models of careers. Within such models, individuals’ commitment to their own career in addition to their organization will affect their work attitudes such as work engagement [
32]. Along this line, future studies may also explore career commitment as a mechanism of self-perceived employability’s impact on other work behaviors, such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and job performance.
In conclusion, our study extends the understanding of the positive role of self-perceived employability in an employee’s career success by showing that it protects workers from emotional exhaustion and increases their work engagement during the pandemic. More importantly, our study explores the mechanism of such effects, the understanding of which is lacking in the literature. While coping style has frequently been discussed as an important mechanism that determines individuals’ mental health in facing the pandemic [
56,
57], our study is the first that shows that a positive coping style also mediates the effect of self-perceived employability on emotional exhaustion. Resources provided by employability enables individuals to cope with stress related to COVID-19 more positively, thus leading to lower emotional exhaustion. Interestingly and surprisingly, we find that self-perceived employability may also increase emotional exhaustion through negative coping style. We urge future studies to further examine this effect. For self-perceived employability’s impact on work engagement, we show that career commitment is an important mediator. As previous studies showed that career commitment also leads to other positive work outcomes such as job satisfaction during the pandemic [
58], we expect that the mediating effect of career commitment will extend to other positive outcomes. Both mediators in our study, coping style and career commitment, however, serve only as partial mediators. This suggests that the mechanisms of self-perceived employability are multifold and warrant further investigation.
5.2. Practical Implications
Our results showed that self-perceived employability not only benefits individuals’ own career development but also organizations as it leads to psychologically healthier and more productive employees. This has practical implications for individuals and employers alike. The COVID-19 pandemic takes a serious toll on individuals’ emotional health and productivity. Our studies showed that individuals with high self-perceived employability can cope better in such a difficult time. To sustain career success, it is crucial for individuals to foster their employability. Organizations face the employability paradox as they are concerned that employees with high employability will tend to leave the organizations for external job opportunities [
59]. Our results show that self-perceived employability does not necessarily lead to turnover, it also increases to a large extent employees’ job engagement, even during the pandemic. In this sense, organizations should not be reluctant to invest in employees’ employability.
Moreover, our study explains how to reduce impact of negative emotional state by coping style. People should adopt a positive coping style to handle emotional problems. Although positive ways focus on the problem itself and may cost more resources temporarily [
27,
60], for long-term perspective, this coping style can relieve emotion burnout. On the contrary, negative coping style is short-term emotion-orientated [
29] and only aggravates emotional exhaustion. Hence, organizations and individuals should foster positive coping to deal with stress so that individuals can build a positive career development cycle [
9].
Moreover, the importance of career commitment is found in this study. Career commitment means employees can trigger their working motivation spontaneously [
35] and such investment for vocation may further lead to promising and sustainable career trajectory [
37]. Hence, increasing individuals’ career commitment also is the effective way to improve productivity. For organizations, they can increase the significance of vocation, encouraging employees to immerse themselves in their career. For individuals, choosing the interesting career is of importance, which motivates them to accumulate experience continuously to gain long-term career success [
37].
5.3. Limitations
Several limitations of our study should be noted. First, although the current model has satisfactory fit indexes, the cross-sectional nature of the current study cannot support causal inferences adequately and future research should adopt a longitudinal design to test the causal effects. The relationship between career commitment and self-perceived employability may be in the reversed direction. In spite of this, the other hypotheses tested may be more logical in the current forms. Because self-perceived employability is a more general and enduring personal attribute compared with the other variables, it is more logical that it predicts the other specific attributes than the other way around. Nevertheless, the self-report measurements used may induce social desirability bias and the cross-sectional data may also increase homogeneity between variables. Future studies will benefit from objective and multi-source measures of the study variables.
Secondly, the sample of this study was based on a nationwide survey covering a wide range of industries but limited to HR professionals. Though, as discussed earlier, HR professionals are especially suitable for examining the research hypotheses, the narrow focus on a single occupational group may influence the external validity of the results [
40]. However, the logics underlying our hypothesis development is not limited to HR professionals and previous studies have studied the effect of self-perceived employability on work outcomes in other professions [
53]. This gives us confidence that our theorizing and results are unlikely to be limited to the HR profession. Nevertheless, future research is needed to examine the generalizability of our research findings to employees of other occupations.
Lastly, there exist different conceptualizations of employability. In the current study, we adopted the outcome-based conceptualization that focuses on the results of being employable, that is, self-perceived employability. Employability can also be seen from an input-based view that looks into the factors that contribute to employability, such as skills, knowledge, and attitudes [
61]. Future studies should examine whether input-based conceptualization of employability leads to the same research findings. In our current study, our theoretical models focus on employability’s role as a personal resource; we believe this view will also apply to input-based employability as they directly conceptualize the specific resources implied by being employable.