The Relationships Between Career Adaptability, Psychological Capital, Social Capital, and Personality Traits: A Network Analysis

ABSTRACT With the effects of globalization and digitalization, the business world and labor markets have undergone massive changes in recent decades, including the skills and abilities that individuals in the workforce need to possess. Career adaptability therefore, has attracted growing attention from researchers as an important internal resource that may help individuals adapt to these changing conditions. It is well‐established in the available literature that individuals’ career adaptability is closely associated with their other dispositional, psychological, and social resources, but little is known about how these major factors interact within a system to shape outcomes. Employing a network analysis approach, the present study aimed to examine the associations among career adaptability, psychological capital, social capital, and personality traits. A total of 648 undergraduates (52.3% female) from two universities in Türkiye were surveyed with the measures of career adaptability, the Big Five personality traits, psychological capital, and social capital. EBICglasso network results demonstrated that components of psychological capital, particularly self‐efficacy and resilience, occupied the center of the network, while other nodes spread relatively peripherally. In addition, significant associations were found among the components of career adaptability, psychological capital, social capital, and personality traits. These results emphasize the importance of understanding the different roles played by each construct in the career adaptability process and underline that psychological capital resources may play a central role.