Psychological Capital Research: A Meta-Analysis and Implications for Management Sustainability

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to conduct a wide-ranging meta-analytic review of empirical psychological capital studies in the management field. We conducted a meta-analysis on papers collected from the EBSCOhost and ProQuest databases. For comprehensive and extensive literature coverage, we also searched and compared the Journal Citation Report for the journals that referenced the most-cited articles (e.g., Journal of Organizational Behavior, Academy of Management Journal, etc.). A total of 81 published types of research were thoroughly selected and analyzed. The results revealed that, with different weighting, the following influencing factors have significant associations with psychological capital: organizational climate, organizational justice, authentic leadership, leader–member exchange, and occupational stress. Also, with different influencing weighting, psychological capital is confirmed to have impacts on job satisfaction, attitude, performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and undesirable behaviors. Implications for managerial sustainability are discussed.

Working from home during the corona pandemic: Investigating the role of authentic leadership, psychological capital, and gender on employee performance

“…As mentioned earlier, the implementation of WFH for public organization potentially influence how employees perceive leadership, manage work-family interference, and perform their tasks via digital devices. This study confirmed the effect of Authentic Leadership on employees' PsyCap (Amunkete & Rothmann, 2015;Kong et al, 2018) and performance (Walumbwa et al, 2008(Walumbwa et al, , 2010Wang & Hsieh, 2013;Wang et al, 2014). Given that the employees work from home, this study also revealed that WFH did not hamper the positive impact of Authentic Leadership on employees' psychological states and performance.…”

“…PsyCap has a negative association with some undesired employees' outcomes (Bitmiş & Ergeneli, 2015) and stress (Avey et al, 2009). A recent meta-analysis found that PsyCap was positively associated with Authentic Leadership (Kong et al, 2018). The evidence from Management and Psychology suggests that PsyCap fosters employees' positivity and attenuates many undesired employees' outcomes.…”

The Psychology of Sustainability and Psychological Capital: New Lenses to Examine Well-Being in the Translation Profession

“…PsyCap has been shown to be relevant for career, work attitudes, job satisfaction and performance, employee engagement, organizational citizenship behaviour, and perceptions of employability (Chiesa et al, 2018;Joo, Lim, & Kim, 2016;Kong et al, 2018;Paek et al, 2015;Soni & Rastogi, 2019;Wang et al, 2018). In their meta-analysis of PsyCap research, Kong et al (2018) confirmed that psychological capital is an intangible but powerful tool for affecting organizational behaviour, and that promoting the development of PsyCap should be a priority.…”

Top Management Attributes, Psychological Capital, and Green Accounting Effectiveness in Public-Private Partnership Context

“…The psychological capital is important in building a relationship between leaders and their followers (Kong et al, 2018), especially when taking on collective initiatives. It focuses on strengthening the virtues and merits of an organization (Luthans et al, 2004, 2007; Luthans and Youssef, 2004).…”