Relationships between career resilience and career beliefs of employees in Taiwan

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships between career resilience and career beliefs among employees in Taiwan. This study also examined whether selected demographic variables had effects on career resilience and career beliefs. A pilot study involving 178 participants was conducted in Taiwan to validate the instruments used in the main study. Twenty items were selected for measuring career resilience. These items were taken from London's Career Motivation Inventory (1993b), Noe, R. A., Noe, A. W., and Bachhuber's measures of career motivation (1990), and Michigan's Career Resilience Scale (Bice, 1999, January 24-30). Forty-nine items consisting of 10 subscales in the Career Beliefs Scale were adopted from Yang's Chinese Career Beliefs Inventory-Form B (1996). The study had 578 current employees from diverse work settings in Taiwan.
Career resilience scores were negatively correlated with the total career beliefs scores (r = -.22, p less then .01), which indicated that participants who were higher on career resilience tended to possess fewer irrational career beliefs. Career resilience scores were negatively correlated with belief in fate, avoidance of decision making, the belief that some occupations are more prestigious than others, possessing sex role stereotypes, assuming other's help can determine the best choice, and the belief that salary is the primary concern when making career choices. Career resilience scores were positively correlated with the belief that one should find the best-fit career and that work is very important in one's life. However, the magnitudes of coefficients were small (the absolute r values were all less than .40).
The results of ANOVA showed that gender, education, type of institution, recent participation in training/educational activities, and supervisory experience yielded statistically significant main effects in career resilience scores. Additionally, there was a significant interaction effect on career resilience for gender by education. MANOVA results showed that gender, age, educational levels, types of institutions, supervisory experience, career change, and recent participation in training activities yielded statistically significant differences among career beliefs. Discriminant analyses were applied to further investigate the differences among the 10 career belief subscales for the significant demographic variables.