How does career transformation support affect seafarers’ retention intention? The mediating roles of career transformation certainty and perceived stress

Against the backdrop of intensifying global seafarer shortages, enhancing seafarers’ retention intention to extend their service periods at sea has become an imperative task for shipping enterprises. Based on the job demands-resources theory (JD-R), this study explored the mechanism by which career transformation support from organisations affects officer-seafarers’ retention intention by analysing a cross-level mediation model involving 317 shipping enterprises and 954 Chinese officer-seafarers. The results indicated that career transformation support enhanced retention intention through a fully mediated pathway by increasing the officer-seafarers’ career transformation certainty (β = 0.316, p < 0.001) and reducing their perceived stress related to career transformation (β = -0.249, p < 0.001). Notably, the mediating effect of perceived stress due to career transformation existed solely at the between-group level, while within-group individual stress variations showed no significant impact. This conclusion breaks through the traditional binary framework of ‘onboard or onshore,’ and provides a practical paradigm of psychological resource management for shipping enterprises to achieve the goal of retaining officer-seafarers by building a systematic career pathway and a standardised stress buffer system at the organisational level.