The Effect of Psychological Capital on Job Engagement, Organizational Commitment and Job Satisfaction; The Mediating Role of Job Emotions

Psychological capital is one of the indicators of positive psychology with characteristics such as a person's belief in his abilities to achieve success, having perseverance in pursuing goals, creating positive documents about herself and enduring problems. One of the consequences of psychological capital is increasing job engagement of employees. In recent years, attention has been paid to job engagement and it has been noticed by leaders and managers of organizations as a vital element in organizational effectiveness (Bedarkar & Pandita, 2013). Job engagement consists of a set of internal forces that originates beyond the existence of a person and society, initiates work-related behaviors of individuals and determines its direction, intensity, and continuity (Xu et al., 2023). Another consequence of psychological capital is increasing the organizational commitment of employees. Organizational commitment is the desire to participate in constructive activities and exercises instead of feeling aimless (Heinz, 2015). In addition to employees' organizational commitment, their job satisfaction can also be affected by psychological capital. Job satisfaction is a variable to measure employees' positive or negative feelings about their job or work experience. (Locke, 2020). Another factor that can be influenced by psychological capital is the job emotions of employees.

The correlation research design is through structural equation modeling, which is a multivariate correlation method. The statistical population of the research includes all employees of Farhangian University of Khuzestan province, of which 150 were selected as a sample through multi-stage sampling method. The research instrument include psychological capital questionnaire (Luthans et al., 2007), job-related emotional well-being scale (Van Katwyk, 2000), job engagement questionnaire (Schaufeli et al, 2002), job satisfaction questionnaire (2000) (Judge & Bono, and the organizational commitment questionnaire (Blau & Boal, 1989).

Evaluation of the proposed model was done through structural equation modeling and using SPSS and AMOS version 23 software. The results indicated that the direct effect of psychological capital on positive emotions, negative emotions, job engagement, organizational commitment and job satisfaction, the direct effect of positive emotions and negative emotions on job engagement, job commitment and job satisfaction, and the indirect effect of psychological capital on job engagement, organizational commitment and job satisfaction were through positive and negative emotions.

The findings indicated that by teaching psychological capital to employees, in addition to reducing negative emotions and improving their positive emotions, it is possible to increase job engagement, organizational commitment and job satisfaction of employees.