Moderated mediating effect of appearance satisfaction on the relationship between academic major satisfaction, self-esteem, and employment stress by airline service major students

Introduction. Airline service major students choose their academic major to be flight attendants after graduating from secondary education. They are therefore likely to be satisfied with the airline service major, as students can learn qualified airline service-related knowledge and skills. However, they also have higher employment stress than students majoring in other majors. This is because physical appearance is an important aspect of the job interview. It is therefore necessary to study academic major satisfaction, self-esteem, and appearance satisfaction to reduce employment stress among airline service major students. Methods. The participants in this study were 339 airline service major students from four universities. Data were collected from freshmen (31%), sophomore (14.7%), junior (28%), and senior (26.3%) students majoring in airline service. This study used SPSS Win.21.0 statistics programs to conduct the frequency test, reliability and correlation tests. For the moderated mediation analysis, ‘Model 14 of PROCESS macro ver.4.0’ was used as the statistical method. Results. First, employment stress had negative correlations with both academic major satisfaction (r = -.326, p<.01) and self-esteem (r = -.401, p<.01), while academic major satisfaction had a positive correlation with self-esteem (r = .433, p < .01). Second, appearance satisfaction was found to have conditional indirect effects on the relationship between academic major satisfaction and employment stress through self-esteem that were significant (p < .01) when the appearance satisfaction values were 4.0 (-.2218~-.0776) and 5.0 (-.3775~-.1505), respectively. Therefore, the moderated mediation effect of resilience was verified. Conclusions. This study found that airline service major students with high appearance satisfaction have decreased employment stress. The results of this study indicate that students’ appearance satisfaction should be fostered and reinforced with the goal of increasing improving airline service major students’ self-esteem and decreasing their employment stress.