Poster Presentation 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

Training PsyCap and Character Strengths within Goal Setting to Instill a Self-Regulated Virtual Cycle of Employee Engagement (#803)

Jennifer Thompson 1 , Dustin Johnson 1
  1. Business Psychology, The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, Chicago, IL, USA

This study looks at the way in which an individual can increase and sustain their own Psychological Capital (PsyCap) and Employee Engagement with training of Psychological Capital, Character Strengths, or a combination of both. This idea is tested by training various individuals online to create their goals using principals of PsyCap, training individuals to use their strengths at work more often, or a combination of the two. Each condition group was compared to each other and a control waiting group via testing before training, after training, and again four months after training, analyzed in a repeated measured ANOVA. It was found that all training lead to increases in both PsyCap and Employee Engagement directly after training, but that training PsyCap alone reverted to a base-line norm for both after four months, whereas Character Strengths and combination training led to a sustained change in PsyCap and Employee Engagement over four months. Recommendations are provided on an organizational level basis for implementing the training of Character Strengths or combination training.