ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Health Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1617956
How does mindfulness affect media employees' creative engagement? The chain-mediation model of institutional pressures and career adaptability
Provisionally accepted
- 1Lingnan Culture Digital Research Center, Dongguan City University, Dongguan, China, Guangdong, China
- 2Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, City University of Macau, Macau, China
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Background: Artificial intelligence is reshaping media production, forcing professionals to confront stringent institutional pressures and rising innovation demands. Although employee mindfulness is a critical psychological resource, its mechanism for fostering creative engagement under high constraints remains unclear. Objective: This study examines how employee mindfulness influences creative engagement through a chain-mediation model of institutional pressures and career adaptability among Chinese media professionals. Methods: Data from 804 media professionals were analyzed using hierarchical regression and PROCESS Macro (Model 6) to test direct and indirect effects, controlling for demographic variables. Results: (1) Employee mindfulness, institutional pressures, and career adaptability each have significant direct predictive effects on media professionals’ creative engagement; (2) Institutional pressures and career adaptability play a chain mediating role in the relationship between employee mindfulness and creative engagement, with this mediating effect involving three pathways: employee mindfulness → institutional pressures → creative engagement (indirect effect = 0.094, 95% CI = [0.060, 0.134], accounting for 25.54% of the total effect); employee mindfulness → career adaptability → creative engagement (indirect effect = 0.069, 95% CI = [0.043, 0.098], accounting for 18.75% of the total effect); employee mindfulness → institutional pressures → career adaptability → creative engagement (indirect effect = 0.042, 95% CI = [0.027, 0.060], accounting for 11.41% of the total effect). Conclusion: Mindfulness promotes creative engagement by reducing institutional pressures and enhancing career adaptability, revealing a “cognitive restructuring-capability enhancement” mechanism. Findings offer theoretical and practical insights for balancing compliance and innovation in media organizations.
Keywords: institutional pressures, Employee mindfulness, Chinese media, creative engagement, Career adaptability, media psychology
Received: 25 Apr 2025; Accepted: 08 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 WU and Gao. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yongxuan Gao, Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, City University of Macau, Macau, China
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