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 ( r = 0.376–0.696, p 0 .001); (2) work engagement partially mediated the cross-sectional relationship between teaching beliefs and wellbeing; (3) career adaptability significantly and positively moderated the cross-sectional relationship between teaching beliefs and work engagement ( B = 0.123, p 0 .001); (4) the index of moderated mediation was statistically significant Index = 0.051, 95% CI (0.022, 0.079); Johnson–Neyman analysis indicated that approximately 43.7% of the teachers fell within the region of non-significance (raw career adaptability score 4.11). 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.