Editorial summary. This is our text summary of an article. Charts, figures, and the author’s full voice are at the original — read it there .
Licence. The original is licensed under CC BY 4.0. This page adapts it: the summary and analysis are ours, not the authors’.
Editorial verdict
Methodologically competent but constrained by cross-sectional design and an unusually high job crafting–career calling correlation (r = 0.815) that raises discriminant validity concerns — treat the serial mediation pathway as hypothesis-generating rather than confirmatory.
Executive summary
This study addresses the mechanisms through which high-performance work systems (HPWS) are associated with career calling among intensive care unit (ICU) nurses in China — a workforce facing persistent turnover and high emotional demand. The authors argue that HPWS influences career calling not only directly but through the sequential mediation of job crafting (a behavioral mechanism) and thriving at work (a psychological mechanism). Using a cross-sectional survey of 543 ICU nurses from five tertiary public hospitals in Shandong Province, China, the study employed Hayes' PROCESS macro (Model 6) with 5,000 bootstrap resamples to test a serial mediation model. Key findings indicate that perceived HPWS had a significant total effect on career calling (β = 0.543), with job crafting accounting for 59.30% of the total effect as the dominant mediator. Thriving at work alone did not significantly mediate the relationship, but the serial pathway — HPWS → job crafting → thriving → career calling — was significant (β = 0.012). The final model explained 70.9% of variance in career calling. The authors conclude that organizational support is most closely tied to vocational meaning when nurses can proactively reshape their work, suggesting that managerial initiatives enabling nurse agency and autonomy within standardized ICU environments may be associated with stronger professional identification.
Key insights
- 1Job crafting is the dominant behavioral pathway between perceived HPWS and career calling, accounting for 59.30% of the total effect — far exceeding the contribution of thriving at work alone.
- 2Thriving at work does not independently mediate the HPWS–career calling relationship; it functions only as a downstream outcome of job crafting within a serial pathway, suggesting that organizational support alone does not produce psychological thriving without prior proactive behavioral engagement.
- 3Despite high standardization and protocol-driven routines in ICU settings, nurses exhibited higher relational and cognitive crafting than task crafting, indicating that meaning-making and interpersonal adaptation remain accessible avenues for agency within constrained clinical environments.
Practical takeaways
- Organizations implementing HPWS practices (training, promotion pathways, role clarity, job security) may see stronger associations with nurses' career calling when these are paired with structural opportunities for proactive work adjustment — such as participation in workflow optimization, case reflection, and multidisciplinary collaboration.
- The finding that training and promotion scored lowest among HPWS dimensions even in tertiary hospitals points to a gap between formal HR policy and lived nurse experience of career development support.
Frameworks mentioned
High-Performance Work Systems (HPWS)
An integrated bundle of HR practices — including rigorous recruitment, systematic training, transparent promotion, performance appraisal, role clarity, and employment security — designed to enhance employees' ability, motivation, and opportunity to perform.
PROCESS Macro (Model 6)
A regression-based serial mediation analytical approach developed by Hayes, used here to test sequential indirect effects between HPWS and career calling via job crafting and thriving at work, with 5,000 bootstrap resamples.
References
- World Health Organization (2025).State of the World's Nursing 2025: Investing in Education, Jobs, Leadership and Service Delivery.
- Cornell University Press (2000).Manufacturing Advantage: Why High-Performance Work Systems Pay Off.
- Academy of Management Journal (2012).How does human resource management influence organizational outcomes? A meta-analytic investigation of mediating mechanisms.
- Academy of Management Review (2001).Crafting a job: Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work.
- Organization Science (2005).A socially embedded model of thriving at work.
- Journal of Organizational Behavior (2012).Thriving at work: Toward its measurement, construct validation, and theoretical refinement.
- Guilford Press (2018).Introduction to Mediation, Moderation, and Conditional Process Analysis: A Regression-Based Approach.
- Journal of Clinical Epidemiology (2008).The Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) statement: Guidelines for reporting observational studies.
- Healthcare (2022).High-Performance work systems, thriving at work, and job burnout among nurses in Chinese public hospitals: The role of resilience at work.
- Frontiers in Psychology (2022).Can resilience promote calling among Chinese nurses in intensive care units during the COVID-19 pandemic? The mediating role of thriving at work and moderating role of ethical leadership.
- Chinese Journal of Clinical Psychology (2020).Reliability and validity of the thriving at work scale in Chinese employees.
- Counseling Psychologist (2009).Calling and vocation at work: Definitions and prospects for research and practice.
- Western Journal of Nursing Research (2019).Perceived calling and work engagement among nurses.
- Psychology, Health & Medicine (2023).Regulatory emotional self-efficacy as a mediator between high-performance work system perceived by nurses on their job burnout: A cross-sectional study.
- European Management Journal (2016).The effects of high-performance work systems on hospital employees' work-related well-being: Evidence from Greece.
- Journal of Occupational Health Psychology (2013).The impact of job crafting on job demands, job resources, and well-being.
Source & Provenance
Not specified
Min Chen, Huizi Wang, Yue Ling, Hongbin Zhu, Yuqin Liu, Yue Yuan, Cuiping Xu
November 2, 2026
Research Study
Asia-Pacific
Original source metadata is preserved. AI analysis is generated separately.
Like this? Get the Monday Decision Brief — free, every week.
No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Rate this article
Want the full article? Read it at the original source — free, no paywall.
Read original article