Mentoring quality and faculty well-being in Chinese law schools: emotional resilience as a dual mediator and personality as a boundary condition

Faculty well-being has become an increasing concern in higher education, particularly in high-demand academic contexts such as law schools. This study examines whether mentoring quality is associated with faculty well-being, operationalized as flourishing, among Chinese law faculty. It tests a moderated mediation model in which two dimensions of emotional resilience—generating positive emotions and recovering from negative emotional experiences—mediate the relationship between mentoring quality and flourishing, while personality traits (extraversion and emotional stability) moderate both the links between mentoring quality and emotional resilience and those between emotional resilience and flourishing. A cross-sectional survey design was employed, with data collected from 622 faculty members across Chinese law schools. Analyses were conducted using regression-based moderated mediation models. The results indicate that both dimensions of emotional resilience mediate the relationship between mentoring quality and flourishing. Extraversion positively moderates the association between mentoring quality and the generation of positive emotions, whereas emotional stability moderates the association between mentoring quality and recovery from negative emotions. Extraversion also moderates the relationship between generating positive emotions and flourishing, whereas emotional stability does not significantly moderate the relationship between recovery from negative emotions and flourishing. The direct association between mentoring quality and flourishing is not statistically significant. Overall, the findings suggest that mentoring quality is linked to faculty well-being primarily through emotional processes, and that individual personality traits condition these associations in higher education contexts.