Why do students involve in leisure-sport industries? Using the stimulus-organism-response model to understand career engagement in leisure-sport industries.

Leisure-sport is a professional industry that promotes people’s physical and mental health in the world. It is important to train and retain professionals to enhance service quality and industrial development. The purpose of this study is to identify the antecedents of career engagement in leisure-sport industries by using stimulus (learning engagement)-organism (professional identity and career self-efficiency)-response (career engagement) model from students’ perspectives who are studying in the department of leisure-sport. Quantitative method was adopted to address the study issues. Questionnaire was developed by the researcher according to previous studies. Purposive sampling was used to select respondents who are college junior and senior students in Department of Sport management and Department of Recreational Management in National Taiwan University of Sport. A total of one hundred and forty-three copied questionnaires were collected, the effective response rate was 91.6%. The collected data were analyzed by descriptive statistics and partial least squares structural equation modeling. The study findings indicated that students’ learning engagement does not significantly influence their career engagement in leisure-sport industries. However, learning engagement has indirectly significant effects on career engagement via professional identity and career self-efficiency, which are full mediators in the model. Accordingly, increasing students’ professional identity and career self-efficiency can contribute to their career engagement in leisure-sport industries.