Abstract
Orientation: Organisations need energetic and dedicated employees to enhance the quality of their services and products continuously. According to the Conservation of Resources Theory, it is possible to increase work engagement of employees by improving their personal resources.Research purpose: The main aim of this study was to examine the extent to which an improvement in psychological capital, as a personal resource, might enhance work engagement of employees in the public sector.Motivation for the study: This study was developed to investigate how and to what extent interventions aiming at fostering higher work engagement through the enhancement of psychological capital were certainly effective.Research design, approach and method: To improve psychological capital, a new resource-based intervention programme (FAMILY intervention) was developed and applied, in which six dimensions – namely framing, attitudes, meaningfulness, identity, leading self and yoked together – were improved. A semi-experimental research design (pre-test and post-test) was used to conduct this study. Participants were 54 employees working in an Italian public health administration. In the pre-test and post-test stages, data were collected by using the psychological capital and work engagement scales.Main findings: Results showed that there is a positive relationship between psychological capital and work engagement in the pre-test and post-test stages, considered separately. In addition, comparing pre-test and post-test results revealed that the intervention programme significantly improved both psychological capital and work engagement. This shows that an improvement in psychological capital is consistent with an increase in work engagement.Conclusion: Together, these findings prove that psychological capital can be considered as a set of personal resources which lead to increased work engagement.Contribution/value-add: This study bridged the gap found in the literature between the role of psychological capital in fostering higher work engagement and the extent to which interventions are effective among employees working in public administration.
Highlights
The perceived image of the public sector has been in decline since the 1960s, with public employees typically being stereotyped as lazy, inefficient and basically demotivated (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992)
Personal resources are aspects of the self that are generally linked to resilience and refer to individuals’ sense of their ability to control and have a successful impact on their environment (Hobfoll, Johnson, Ennis & Jackson, 2003). Some of these personal resources such as self-efficacy (Bandura, 1989), organisational-based self-esteem (Pierce, Gardner, Cummings, & Dunham, 1989) and optimism (Scheier & Carver, 1985) have been recognised by Hobfoll (2002) as fundamental components of individual adaptability. According to this line of research, we propose psychological capital as a personal resource, which is regarded as malleable through specific interventions among employees of the public administration
Similar to the pre-test, in the post-test hope (r = 0.76, p < 0.01) and self-efficacy (r = 0.55, p < 0.01) had stronger correlations with work engagement compared to optimism (r = 0.47, p < 0.01) and resilience (r = 0.48, p < 0.001)
Summary
The perceived image of the public sector has been in decline since the 1960s, with public employees typically being stereotyped as lazy, inefficient and basically demotivated (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992). The resultant negative connotations associated with cumbersomely led public agencies (Goodsell, 2003) have caused what Jacobson (2011) defines as a ‘human capital crisis’, with public service careers appealing to only a few This stereotyped image of the lazy and idle employee, lacking motivation or a sense of responsibility, is even more evident in some European countries such as Italy (Pipan, 2000), where the organisational culture of public agencies has not really changed, despite recent efforts of the government to make a cultural change through public management reforms (Cristofoli, Nasi, Turrini, & Valotti, 2011). Open Access stereotypical image of public administration (Vigoda-Gadot & Meiri, 2008) Among these efforts, work engagement was recognised as a central factor to enhance motivation and retention among public sector employees (Saks, 2006). Work engagement represents a positive, affective-motivational, work-related state of mind characterised by vigour, fulfilment, absorption and dedication while an employee is performing tasks at the workplace (Schaufeli, Salanova, Gonzalez-Roma & Bakker, 2002)
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