Psychological capital :|links to support, job engagement and organizational commitment

Abstract

Positive psychology discipline is concerned with the positive emotions, positive behaviors and supportive institutions with an aim of understanding both human suffering, happiness and their enablers. Under the positive psychology discipline, psychological capital construct emerged to help us understand developmental capacity of individuals in terms of having self-efficacy to spend necessary endeavors to achieve goals, feeling optimistic about success, having hope and perseverance towards goals and being resilient when encountered by obstacles. This study’s main purpose was understanding the impact of psychological capital on affective commitment and job engagement. For this objective, responses from 206 employees from different industries and various occupations were collected with a two-phased questionnaire. The results showed that psychological capital had an important influence on affective commitment and job engagement along with a strong relationship with workplace support. Furthermore, there was the full mediation effect of psychological capital between perceived organizational support, supervisor support, coworker support and job engagement. The results of this study are providing future researchers with support that PsyCap is an important construct which needs to be investigated when studying employee outcomes and workplace support. Since the research of psychological capital has been developing recently, more research and attention are needed for its understanding and prediction on employee outcomes.