Exploring graduate students’ research characteristics, emotional exhaustion, mastery approach, and research career commitment: insights from the JD-R theory

ABSTRACT

The job demands-resources (JD-R) theory has been widely applied to explore relationships between employees’ job characteristics and performance, particularly in contexts of paid work. This study extends the application scope of the JD-R theory to unpaid research contexts among graduate students. Results of an online questionnaire survey with 914 research-oriented Chinese graduate students verified the dual processes proposed by the JD-R theory. Specifically, the graduate students’ perceived stress led to emotional exhaustion and sequentially decreased their research career commitment; academic support fostered mastery approach and then increased the research career commitment. In addition, mastery approach played a significant mediating role in the relationship between academic support and research career commitment. The findings enhance the understanding of graduate students’ research characteristics and performance and have implications for optimizing the research environment for graduate students and stimulating their motivation and commitment to research career.

KEYWORDS:

• Job demands-resources theory
• emotional exhaustion
• mastery approach
• research career commitment
• graduate students

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This study is funded by the Project of Outstanding Young and Middle-aged Scholars of Shandong University, and Shandong University Program of Graduate Education and Reform under grant number XYJG2023037.