Empirical Research About Effects Of Psycholgical Capital On Knowledge Workers' Work Performance

Average wage of Chinese workers is lower than their counterparts in developed countries. At the same time, their average working hours are longer than them. One report showed that Chinese workers'workload in one year is four times as American workers'. Under that circumstance, Chinese workers tend to showing negative attitudes and behaviors. Because of the uncertain external context, most employees have to pay out lots of time and energy when making important decisions. "Sense of out of control" weakens individuals'confidence and accordingly leads them to a state of despair about future. In micro level, this feeling has negative effects on individuals, for example, it may lowered their physical power, work involvement, healthy and happiness. In organizational level, it also can results in bad outcomes such as drop of performance and morale. One extreme result related to the above situation is employee's suicide events which happened several times in last year. When confronting crisis events, traditional practices in management inclined to focus on dealing with them but not preventing them. In fact, cost of crisis prevention is much less than the resources spend on dealing with it. This notion leads researchers and managers to think preventing crisis in human resource management through psychological interventions. Adopting positive organizational practices to improve employee's performance is valued more and more by modern scholars and managers. Everyone lived in a relational society, that causing psychological state, human relationship and work performance work together. Scholars like Luthans take those prevention practices in working context as positive organizational behavior, which mainly focus on improving workers'performance through psychological interventions. Those positive interventions not only can improve employees'work performance but also can avoid negative events such as turnover, suicides.The nature of psychological capital is the positive psychological state in the process of individuals'growth and development. Different from traditional psychological constructs, psychological capital concern more on preventions of negative aspects, but not dealing with pathological aspects. Researches of Luthans and his colleagues documented that whether in large or small company, performance can be improved significantly through a limited psychological capital input. Psychological capital is the necessary requirements for knowledge workers'performance improvements, owing to psychological factors can affect people's attitude and behaviors. To some extent, psychological factors are more important than knowledge and talents in determining individuals'success. Psychological capital was derived from positive organizational behavior which generally defined as positive oriented and measurable psychological capacities. Through effective development and management, those capacities can be transformed into human resource advantages. In current rapidly changing environment, mangers always desire for good performance. This objective can be achieved through inputs on psychological capital.Knowledge workers, characterized in independence, autonomy and continuous learning and innovation, always engage in relative important and challenging jobs. That determines their psychological capital can be more easily improved through intervention than common workers. Further, knowledge workers performances have great impact on enterprises'growth. Thus, it's quite necessary to study effects of psychological capital on knowledge workers'performance and how those effects operated.This dissertation was constructed as follows:firstly, extensive related literatures were assembled and reviewed, and then limitations of current researches were put forward. Hypotheses were advanced after literature review. Further, empirical analyses based on surveys were conducted to tested theoretical hypotheses.Major findings of this research are as follows:firstly, the four scales (spirit of enterprises and diligence, resiliency and perseverance, optimism and hope, self-confidence and courage) of task-oriented psychological capital and three scales (modesty and prudence, thanksgiving and dedication, toleration and forgiveness) of guanxi-oriented psychological capital have positive effects on innovative performance. Further, resiliency and perseverance, optimism and hope, modesty and prudence, thanksgiving and dedication, respect and courtesy positively correlated with relational performance. Moreover, self-confidence and courage, modesty and prudence, thanksgiving and dedication, respect and courtesy have positive relationship with learning performance. Finally, self-confidence and courage, modesty and prudence, respect and courtesy also have positive effects on task performance.Moderating effects of organizational commitment were also examined in the research. Results showed that, compared to low organizational commitment individuals, guanxi-oriented psychological capital have stronger effects on innovative and task performance in high organizational commitment group.Effects of demographic variables were also explored in the study, several interesting findings were revealed:male respondents show higher spirit of enterprises and diligence than female, respondents who accepted high level education (vs. low level education) reported higher self-confidence and courage, however, those who accepted low level education reported higher respect and courtesy; participants who work in service industry reported higher self-confidence and courage than those work in manufacture industry; respondents who work for intellectual organizations reported stronger toleration and forgiveness than those who work for manufacturing and service company. Additionally, we did not find significant effects of age and working years on psychological capital.The above findings also have some implications for enterprises human resource management. Existed theoretical analyses related to psychological capital in Chinese context generally emphasize the importance of it and only gave some ambiguously advice for employee's psychological capital development. Our empirical studies revealed that different scales of psychological capital have different effects on different performance variables. Therefore, if companies would like to improve their employees' performance through psychological capital development, specific practices which depend on their features should be taken. Specifically, if organizations focus on workers'task performance, they must improve employees'self-confidence and courage, modesty and prudence, respect and courtesy; however, in case corporations were innovation performance oriented, they should improve workers'task-oriented psychological capital and some aspects of guanxi-oriented psychological capital such as modesty and prudence, thanksgiving and dedication, toleration and forgiveness. In one word, enterprises must adopt adaptive practices to improve their employees'performance thereby improve organizational performance. Finally, plans and practices for enhancing workers' organizational commitment should be made toward employees who own high level psychological capital.