Hope and human capital enhance job engagement to improve workplace outcomes

Abstract

Drawing from conservation of resources theory, we contend that motivation (job engagement) fully mediates the relationships between hope and human capital (antecedents) and task performance. We also propose that job engagement provides an interesting explanation for organizational citizenship behaviours (OCBs) that differs from the explanation provided by human capital. Using triad data collected from 170 employees, their supervisors, and their peers at 15 different business organizations in Turkey across four waves, we find that the associations of hope and human capital with task performance occur through job engagement. Interestingly, one path (human capital–job engagement–task performance–OCBs) provides a chain of positive associations that can explain OCBs, whereas another path (human capital–OCBs) has a direct, negative association with OCBs. The results suggest that the motivational value of job engagement leads to improvement in the task performance and OCBs of individuals who are full of hope and have high human capital.Practitioner points Practising managers should invest in hiring, training, and retaining individuals with high levels of hope and human capital to enhance job engagement in the workplace because such individuals conserve their resources to engage in their job. Job engagement in role A (task) contributes to role B (OCBs) because high accomplishment in task performance generates positive emotions, which lead to high achievement in OCBs. Therefore, practising managers should allow their subordinates to allocate their resources to addressing their multiple roles in the order of the importance that they assign to these roles because employees’ resources, energy, time, and attentional capacities are limited.