Teaching beliefs and wellbeing among primary school teachers: a moderated mediation of work engagement and career adaptability.

Objective: Drawing on an integrative analytical framework drawing on the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model and Career Construction Theory, this study investigated the conditional indirect mechanism underlying the association between teaching beliefs and teacher wellbeing, with a particular focus on the mediating role of work engagement and the moderating effect of career adaptability. Methods: A questionnaire survey was administered to 561 primary school teachers in Guangdong Province, China, using the Teaching Beliefs Scale (TBS), the Career Adapt-Abilities Scale (CAAS), the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES-17), and the General wellbeing Schedule (GWB). A moderated mediation model was tested with Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) 26.0 and the PROCESS macro (Model 7). Results: The main findings were as follows: (1) Teaching beliefs, career adaptability, work engagement, and wellbeing were all significantly and positively intercorrelated ( Conclusion: These findings indicate that teaching beliefs are conditionally and indirectly associated with wellbeing via work engagement, and this pathway is systematically moderated by career adaptability. For teachers with insufficient career adaptability, prioritizing the enhancement of meta-resource levels may serve as a critical condition for the beliefs-engagement-wellbeing associational pathway to become statistically detectable.