Pattern Mining on How Organizational Tenure Affects the Psychological Capital of Employees Within the Hospitality and Tourism Industry: Linking Employees' Organizational Tenure With PsyCap

Introduction

Psychological capital (PsyCap) is a measure of the positive capabilities of an individual which consists of four components: hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism (Antunes, Caetano, & Cunha, 2017; Luthans, Youssef, & Avolio, 2007). Efficacy is the psychological quality of an individual that is reflected in their ability to carry out pending tasks diligently within a given time frame (Luthans & Youssef, 2017; Stajkovic & Luthans, 1998). Employees with positive efficacy usually source for resources to achieve set goals within time limits (Breevaart, Bakker, & Demerouti, 2014). According to Kobau et al. (2011), optimism is a quality that associates positive events with personal and permanent causes, while interpreting negative events as external, temporary, and contextual. Optimistic individuals are flexible and pragmatic (Alarcon, Bowling, & Khazon, 2013; Carver & Scheier, 2002), focusing on positive outcomes while pursuing desired goals. Hope, in the opinion of (Snyder et al., 1991), is a state that motivates wishful thinking geared towards successfully achieving a desired goal. Resilience is the ability of an individual to recover from, or adapt to stress and adversity which could arise from family, workplace, financial or relationship problems (Lee & Chu, 2016). Positive resilience enables individuals to persevere in unfavourable conditions (Tugade, Fredrickson, & Barrett, 2004), which ultimately affect job performance and organizational outcomes. Collectively, these four components constitute psychological capital and have the positive effect on an individual, manifesting in dedication to duty, job performance, job satisfaction, and self-development (Avey, Reichard, Luthans, & Mhatre, 2011). The commonly used measure of psychological capital is the Psychological Capital Questionnaire (PCQ) (Luthans, et al., 2007). The PCQ is a 6-point scale questionnaire, consisting of 24 items which employees utilize to rate themselves for the purpose of assessing their PsyCap. This measure has been validated by Luthans, Youssef-Morgan, and Avolio (2015) as an authentic tool, and has been adopted in many climes for psychological capital measurement (Antunes et al., 2017).