THE EFFECT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL CAPITAL ON PERSONAL INNOVATION: THE CASE OF EDUCATION SECTOR

Abstract

Psychological capital increases employee’s self-improvement and performance individually while it also provides a competitive advantage to companies by improving employee’s performance. In today’s business world, managers have realized that it is not possible to achieve success in organizations only with physical and financial capital. In order to obtain competitive advantage, they aim to increase and maximize the strengths of human resources. On the other hand, innovations brought by globalization make it mandatory for the employees to adapt to new situations. The fact of education sector having a labour-intensive structure makes it an advantage to have employees with high psychological capital. Meanwhile, it is aimed for the employees to fulfil their work by acting with innovative mind-set and by applying the innovations. It is thought that how organization’s employees’ psychology in the workplace would affect their point of view towards their jobs, and affect how they reveal their new ideas and this thought is the starting point of the study. The fact that education sector employees having strong psychological capital and as the most important outcome of this, the fact that personal innovation trend increasing, are very important since they also provide increase of the efficiency for students. As a result of the analysis made for 382 employees who are academicians lecturing in three private and 4 public universities, it is determined that psychological capital positively affects personal innovation by 69.8%. It has been reached that as the level of psychological capital increases, the level of personal innovation increases.