Does Psychological Capital Combat Learning and Adaptive Stress of College Freshmen

Abstract

Psychological capital (PsyCap) is an important resource for combating one’s stress in organizational context which constructed with core constructs including self-efficacy, optimism, hope and resilience. Colleges freshmen have much stress while their transition from high schools (youth hood) to colleges (adult hood). While the participants from colleges, this study comprised academic self-efficacy, optimism, hope, and academic resilience into PsyCap constructs and examined its effectiveness on learning and adaptive stress of colleges freshmen. 640 survey questionnaires were distributed to participants, 427 usable questionnaires returned, with 66.7% valid return rate graded by the participants from Department of International Business Management (IBM) of 8 universities located in center of Taiwan. The results disclosed, except to the living expense stress, overall PsyCap efficaciously copes with learning and adaptive stress of colleges freshmen. Besides, overall PsyCap has found stronger predictabilities to learning and adaptive stress than its individual element. This study contributed to confirm the role of PsyCap as an important resource in combating with stress across different disciplines, and, in both theoretical and practical implications. The concrete conclusions and recommendations of this study were made for theoretical and practical courses design of IBM, and further studies.