Feeling seen matters: How organization-based self-esteem mediates the relationship between university students' coping resources and thriving in Germany, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates

Introduction: While there is substantial evidence on the negative repercussions of study-related stressors on university students’ mental health and well-being, comparably less is known about a specific adaptive response to stressors in higher education: students’ thriving, that is, the experience of vitality and learning under challenging circumstances. Given the lack of comparative research on students’ adaptive outcomes in diverse cultural contexts, we examined coping resources (i.e., academic self-efficacy, ASE; social belonging, SB) as predictors of female and male students’ thriving in an individualistic culture (i.e., Germany, n = 259), and compared it to two collectivistic cultures (i.e., Indonesia, n = 839; United Arab Emirates, UAE, n = 230). We further investigated the role of organization-based self-esteem (OBSE) as a potential mediator between students’ coping resources and thriving.

Methods and Results: Multiple-group moderated mediation analyses showed that OBSE served as a mediator between SB and thriving in all three countries, irrespective of students’ gender. ASE directly catalyzed thriving among female and male students in Indonesia, only among female students in the UAE, but not in Germany. SB directly contributed to female and male students’ thriving in Germany and Indonesia.

Discussion: Our findings point to the universal decisive role of OBSE in enabling students in different cultures to transform coping resources into experiences of thriving when facing study-related stressors.