Navigating career transition: work ethic and occupational commitment of seafaring officers amid dual occupational anxieties

Facing increasing occupational stress from shipping digitalization and an adverse occupational environment, seafaring officers may experience dual psychological anxieties that influence their career decisions. However, limited research has empirically addressed how and why personal traits affect the decisions in this context. We propose that work ethic, as a core personal trait, is negatively associated with occupational commitment, under the boundary conditions of the dual anxieties. We use career development expectation and occupational environment perception to measure the internal (within-organization) and external (outside-organization) anxieties. We test the hypothesis on a sample of 619 seafaring officers. The results indicate that career development anxiety mediates the relationship between work ethic and career transition intention, with a threshold effect for the moderating role of the external anxiety. When the external anxiety is low (above the threshold), a higher level of work ethic leads to a stronger intention to change the shipboard job, with career development anxiety statistically acting as a suppressor. A more favorable external environment reduces the negative impact of work ethic. When the external anxiety is high (below or at the threshold), the direct effect of work ethic becomes insignificant, and it influences the transition intention primarily through career development anxiety.