What are the four components of positive psychological capital? How is each component defined?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Luthans, Luthans, and Luthans (2004) theorized that people are more likely to succeed when they have the four components of positive psychological capital: confidence (self-efficacy), hope, optimism, and resiliency.

Self-efficacy: Self-efficacy has been defined in earlier chapters and is an important predictor of performance. Trait self-efficacy refers to a more stable individual characteristic, whereas state self-efficacy refers to efficacy with regard to a particular task and to the individual’s feeling of confidence and expectations for success at the time in question. Authentic leadership researchers are more concerned with state self-efficacy. Moreover, Luthans et al. (2007) argued that authentic leadership is concerned with work domain self-efficacy (Bandura, 1998), which is the individual’s belief that he or she has the abilities, skills, and resources to succeed across the entire range of activities at work as opposed to expectations for success on a single specific task.
Hannah, Avolio, Luthans, and Harms (2008) reasoned that leadership efficacy is a specific type of efficacy. Many people may believe that they can be successful in performing their own work but lack confidence in their ability to influence others and lead groups. They state that “Leadership efficacy is a specific form of efficacy associated with the level of confidence in the knowledge, skills, and abilities associated with leading others”(p. 669). In order to have high leadership self-efficacy, you must believe that you can lead your individual followers and the group as a whole toward successful goal accomplishments. Hannah and Luthans (2008) argue that leaders gain experience over their lifetime that influences their psychological capital and efficacy and their knowledge about how to handle various leadership situations.

Hope: Luthans and his colleagues (Luthans et al., 2007) draw upon research by Snyder (2000) for their definition of hope, and they state that “hope constitutes the will to succeed and the ability to identify, clarify, and pursue the way to success” (p. 546) [boldface and italics added; underlining added where the original was already italicized]. They describe hope as a positive motivational state that energizes people to pursue goals. Moreover, they argue that hope includes contingency planning and an active search for ways to achieve a goal. Thus, we can think of hope as having two parts: the will and the way. Let’s say you are pursuing a goal but encounter a problem. If you lack hope, you would remain passive and just give up. But if you are hopeful, you’ll be energized to search for solutions to the problem. You might examine multiple ways to solve the problem, and you’ll keep searching until you find the path to success.

Optimism: Luthans and his colleagues (2007) base their definition of optimism on work done by Seligman (1998). Luthans et al. (2007) state, “Seligman (1998) defines optimists as those who make internal, stable, and global attributions regarding positive events (e.g., task accomplishment) and those who attribute external, unstable, and specific reasons for negative events (e.g., a missed deadline)” (p. 547) [italics and boldface added]. By internal attributions, they mean that the person attributes the outcome to their own efforts rather than to external forces or luck. Thus, optimists attribute success to their own efforts and believe that they will continue to be successful. When something goes wrong, they attribute the failure to a specific environmental factor, perhaps an unlucky chance event, and they believe that in the long term thebad luck will end or that they can overcome the negative environmental factors and achieve success. Seligman has accumulated considerable evidence that indicates the importance of optimism to a wide variety of outcomes.

Resilience: Luthans (2002) defines resilience as the “positive psychological capacity to rebound, to ‘bounce back’ from adversity, uncertainty, conflict, failure, or even positive change, progress and increased responsibility”(p. 702) [italics and boldface added]. As the last part of this definition implies, even positive changes and many everyday work responsibilities call for resilience. Accidents, job loss, major work problems, and illnesses call for even greater levels of resilience. As Masten and Reed (2002) observe, humans have an impressive ability to bounce back from stressful life events. For example, most survivors of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon did not need mental health counseling (Ritchie, Leavitt, & Hanish, 2006). Likewise, even the bombings of London during WWII, which killed 40,000, were not able to break the resilience or the determination of the Londoners (Jones, Woolven, Durodie, & Wessely, 2004).