Psychological capital as a resource in the job demands-resources model
Date
2018
Authors
Mtolo, Sean
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Abstract
Employee wellbeing has emerged as an increasingly important issue for organisations and scholars alike. Much of this interest has predominantly centred on the constructs of burnout and work engagement. These two factors’ increased standing in wellbeing discourse and research is a result of their respective adverse and constructive impacts on employees and organisations alike.
The Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model represents one of the most well-known theoretical models that identifies the antecedents of engagement and burnout. The prominence of this model is largely due to its successful identification of job demands and job resources as seminal predictors of these employee outcomes. Nonetheless, the JD-R model has been the subject of criticism due its dearth of attention placed on the role that personal resources play in the development engagement and burnout. In an attempt to address this critique, this current study examined if the personal resource of Psychological Capital (PsyCap) interacts with job demands to predict burnout and engagement; and whether this personal resource moderates the two-way interaction between job demands and job resources on engagement and burnout.
This current research employed a cross-sectional quantitative research design and obtained a sample of 280 participants from eleven South African organisations. The regression based PROCESS computational tool was used for statistical analysis. This research revealed that job demands interacted with PsyCap to predict burnout and engagement. It was also showed that the buffering impact of job resources in the job demand-burnout relationship was only evident when PsyCap was relatively high. Finally, this research revealed that the interaction between job demands and job resources on engagement was similarly only significant when PsyCap was high.
These research outcomes provide a more comprehensive insight into engagement and burnout by underscoring the significance of personal resources such as PsyCap in ensuring the development of engagement and mitigating burnout. This study’s results also offer additional impetus for the re-development of the JD-R model to accommodate the established importance of personal resources such as PsyCap.
Description
“A research project submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree MA by Coursework and Research in the field of Industrial/Organisational Psychology in the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand May 2017”