The shifting demographic landscape in China, particularly the declining birth rate, has prompted a contraction in the education job market. This creates a high-pressure environment for pre-service teachers. Drawing on the Challenge–Hindrance Stressor Framework, this study interrogates the mechanism linking job Stress (JS) to personal growth initiative (PGI) among students in vocational teacher-training programs. Specifically, we examined how JS is associated with PGI through the mediating pathways of psychological resilience (PR) and future time perspective (FTP). Using a cross-sectional design, survey data from 953 pre-service teachers (predominantly female, aged 19–22) were analyzed via partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Diverging from the traditional “resource depletion” view, the results revealed that JS positively predicted both PR ( β = 0.404, p 0.001) and FTP ( β = 0.369, p 0.001), suggesting that participants appraised the structural pressure as a motivating challenge rather than a hindrance. While both mediators were significantly associated with PGI, FTP exhibited a substantially stronger predictive relevance ( β = 0.642) compared to PR ( β = 0.314). Overall, the model accounted for 83.4% of the variance in PGI. These findings indicate that under specific developmental and cultural contexts, external pressure may paradoxically mobilize internal Resources, initiating a “gain-spiral” rather than resource exhaustion. This underscores the importance of considering temporal cognition and cultural values when interpreting how vocational students navigate structural employment disadvantages.
Song et al. (Fri,) studied this question.
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