A Comprehensive Meta-Analyses of the Nomological Network of Psychological Capital (PsyCap)
verifiedrich profile · Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies · 2022
Loghman, Saeed; Quinn, Michael; Dawkins, Sarah; Woods, Megan; Om Sharma, Sumeet; Scott, Jenn
How this was studied
A meta-analytic synthesis — it pools many primary studies rather than running a single design, so there is no single-study diagram.
What this article reports
The findings we extracted from this work, normalized into Principia’s relationship form (X → Y). Each feeds the synthesized models below.
psychological capital psycap → job satisfaction
psychological capital psycap → work engagement
Models this article informs
The meta-analytic priors this article contributes evidence to — its place in the broader synthesis.
psychological capital psycap correlates job satisfaction
psychological capital psycap predicts job satisfaction
psychological capital psycap predicts overall job performance
psychological capital psycap predicts work engagement
In the authors’ words
The article’s own abstract.
This paper presents the most rigorous meta-analysis undertaken to date of empirical literature examining antecedents and outcomes related to psychological capital (PsyCap), and moderators of these relationships. We investigated seven leadership styles as antecedents of PsyCap (authentic, ethical, servant, empowering, transactional, transformational, and abusive leadership), five outcomes (burnout, turnover intentions, work engagement, performance, and satisfaction), and the impact of four moderators (country of sample origin, cultural characteristics, industry type, and research design). Our analysis of PsyCap research (2007–2020) examined 244 studies (254 independent samples and over 96000 participants), which is over twice as large as previous PsyCap meta-analyses. To optimize the quality and reliability of findings, we corrected for artefacts and included heterogeneity, sensitivity, and publication bias analyses. Our results provide several new findings beyond previous PsyCap meta-analyses. We found that empowering, servant, transformational, and transactional leadership were all positively associated with PsyCap, with empowering and transformational leadership being the strongest antecedents of PsyCap and abusive and transactional leadership being the weakest. The findings demonstrated PsyCap was positively associated with work engagement, and negatively associated with burnout. Country of sample origin moderated all the relationships, except for servant and transactional leadership. Additionally, cultural characteristics (e.g., power distance, masculinity, long-term orientation, and uncertainty avoidance) moderated several conceptual relationships. Study design was also found to moderate the PsyCap—work engagement relationship. Collectively, these findings offer new and extended insights into the antecedents, outcomes, and moderators related to PsyCap, beyond previous meta-analyses. The theoretical and practical implications of these new findings are also discussed.
What the literature says about it
Attributed, open-access quotes from other works that cite this article, plus the citation-graph verdict tally. Corroborations and disputes, in one place — the honest-broker view.
supports “The most recent meta-analysis in psychological capital research examined 244 studies during the period 2007–2020 and concluded that psychological capital positively affects different outcomes, such as work engagement, performance, and satisfaction [26].”
Ancillary research
Neighbouring works in the citation graph around this article.
Assembled from Principia’s registry — bibliographic record, extracted effect sizes, the models they inform, and open-access citing literature.