Linking hospitality and tourism students’ internship satisfaction to career decision self-efficacy: A moderated-mediation analysis involving career development constructs

By drawing extensively from the theories of career-construction and experiential learning, we investigated the moderated-mediation relationship between internship satisfaction and career decision self-efficacy through career adaptability as a function of students’ core self-evaluation in this study. In essence, we argue that the observed direct and indirect relationships between internship satisfaction and career adaptability and career decision making self-efficacy will be conditional to the levels of core self-evaluation in students. We collected data from 516 students from five top-tier private hospitality and tourism institutes in India. The participants considered for this study had successfully completed six-months intensive internship program as a part of their undergraduate course completion requirement. Having established the presence of composite reliability and construct validity of the study constructs, we used SPSS Process v3.3 Macro to test our research propositions through moderated-mediation model (8) to draw valid conclusions. Empirical results from the present study suggest that student satisfaction with internship enhances students' career adaptability and significantly affects career decision self-efficacy among students, conditional to the levels of students' core self-evaluation. In fact, this study enunciates the critical role of career adaptability and situates it as an important intervening variable between the relationship of internship satisfaction and students’ career response as a function of adaptive readiness. By so doing, this study acknowledges and brings forth the importance of self-regulatory mechanisms in individuals that facilitate the espousal of appropriate career adapting response.