Relationships of career adaptabilities with explicit and implicit self-concepts

• We tested additive and interactive contributions of implicit personality measures over explicit ones in relation to CAAS.
• Only implicit extraversion explained unique curiosity variance.
• Implicit and explicit self-esteem interaction revealed significant associations with control, confidence, and adaptability.
• The results revealed good to excellent reliabilities and adequate validity for CAAS-Romanian form.

Career adaptability is a psychosocial construct that incorporates a set of essential resources to one's career development. The adaptability resources' relevance is even higher when it comes to former communist countries, such as Romania, where job security and stability were seen as central benefits for workers. The aim of this study was to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the stable underpinnings of career adaptabilities by exploring their relationships with aspects of the self that are driven by automatic processes and that are less affected by self-presentation biases. A sample of 359 participants completed the Career Adapt Abilities Scale (CAAS)-Romanian form, out of which a subsample of 212 participants also completed a set of scales comprising explicit and implicit measures of conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and self-esteem. Results revealed nonsignificant additive contributions of the implicit self-concept measures over what was already explained by the explicit self-concepts. The most noticeable effect resides in the significant interaction between explicit and implicit self-esteem in relation to control, confidence, and overall adaptability. These results reveal that individuals with high explicit and low implicit self-esteem perceive themselves as being the most adaptable. Notably, these results were obtained using a Romanian version of CAAS that possesses very good psychometric properties (i.e., excellent internal consistencies, the same four-factor multidimensional solution, replicated patterns of associations between CAAS and explicit self-concepts of personality).