A Longitudinal Examination of the Association Between Psychological Capital, Perception of Organizational Virtues and Work Happiness in School Staff

Abstract

Developing employee wellbeing has recently been recognized as an important way to improve organizational performance. Sloan’s (1987) dual-intervention approach suggests that employee wellbeing can be developed bottom-up, by improving employee psychological wellbeing, or top-down by changing the organization. This longitudinal study explores the association between psychological capital (bottom-up factors), organizational virtues (top-down factors), and work happiness. A three-wave repeated measures correlation study was used to analyze the pattern of relationships between employee psychological capital (PsyCap), perception of organizational virtues (OV) and work happiness in staff at an independent K-12 school in Victoria, Australia over a 15-month timespan (baseline N= 247). Within and across time, both employee psychological capital and perception of organizational virtues independently related to greater work happiness. PsyCap and OV strongly correlated with work happiness, with a simplex structure i.e., variables closer in time were more strongly correlated, with correlation strength declining over time. Further, there was some evidence of a small of a synergistic effect. The results suggest that while leaders might target psychological capital in employees or target the organization’s culture to develop employee wellbeing, further benefit may arise by using both top-down and bottom-up strategies. These findings can be used to help schools and other organizations build employee work happiness.