Proactive personality and academic procrastination in graduate students: Their chain-mediation by research self-efficacy and learning adaptability

Abstract

This study explored the relationship between graduate students’ proactive personality and academic procrastination, and the chain-mediation by research self-efficacy and learning adaptability. Participants were 905 postgraduates in China (female =70%; first year =56%; humanities and social sciences =54%). They completed the graduate students’ proactive personality scale, the graduate students’ academic procrastination scale, the research self-efficacy scale, and the learning adaptability scale. Applying chain mediation analyses, results showed that proactive personality was associated with higher research self-efficacy and learning adaptability. Learning adaptability mediated the relationship between proactive personality and academic procrastination, specifically decreasing procrastination. Research self-efficacy and learning adaptability played a chain-mediating role between proactive personality and academic procrastination, with higher cumulative reduction of procrastination than with either self-efficacy and learning adaptability alone. These findings suggest a need for graduate student development and support services to aim at improving students’ self-efficacy and learning adaptability for timely school completion,

Keywords:

• academic procrastination
• graduate student
• proactive personality

Compliance with ethical standards

All procedures performed in the present study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Henan university Psychology Research and Ethics Committee (No. 20210926), and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent was obtained from all research participants included in the study.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy and ethical restrictions.

Statement of author’s contributions

Hang Zhang: conception and design; data collection, analysis, and interpretation; drafting the artic. Zhaoyang Xin, Qinglin Wang, Qianfeng Li and Jing Du: conception and design; data collection; critical revision of the artic. Minghui Wang: conception and design; data interpretation; critical revision of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China [Grant: BIA190168] and the Postgraduate Education Reform Project of Henan University [Grant: YJSJG2022XJ003]