Psychological Capital (PsyCap)
The motivational propensity to succeed.
Psychological Capital, better known as PsyCap, is known as a person’s motivational propensity to have hope, self-efficacy, resilience and optimism. Better translated into business terms:
Hope is a person’s tendency to set goals, think of multiple pathways to achieve those goals, plan for obstacles and break their goals down into smaller steps so the goal seems more achievable.
Self-efficacy is a person’s belief in their ability to succeed, tendency to reach out to a mentor or someone who can role model for them and the ability to reflect on past successful events in their life and extrapolate what will be useful to them in the current situation.
Resilience is the ability to handle stress and failure. It the person’s determination to bounce back even better from setbacks rather than giving up.
Optimism is the person’s ability to take credit for the good things that happen and see it as temporary when something bad happens.
To paint a clearer picture, we can think of the opposite of PsyCap. I am sure you have had the experience of a co-worker who gets easily overwhelmed, can’t see the next step of a project, secretly doesn’t have faith in their abilities, doesn’t reach out to increase their knowledge, gives up when a setback occurs and moans about how bad things always happen to them. Not a fun person to work with!
The good news about PsyCap is that it is not fixed – it can be learned and trained fairly easily. Both in person and online interventions which are short have been found to significantly increase PsyCap and have impressive returns. My work with Dustin Johnson has found that in addition, if you pair it with character strength training, the results hold up after four months.
The key to Psycap is that it is state-like, which means it can be developed and needs to be refreshed over time.
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