Positive organizational behavior: Longitudinal effects on subjective well-being

Abstract

Increasing individual subjective well-being has various positive outcomes, knowledge about its antecedents and the mediators of this relationship can therefore help to increase subjective well-being and the accompanying positive effects. The more future oriented facets of psychological capital, i.e. optimism, hope and self-efficacy have been shown in several studies to be positively related to subjective well-being and negatively to ill-being. Furthermore, recent studies suggest coping strategies as mediators for these relationships. In our study, we examined the longitudinal relation of optimism, hope and self-efficacy with subjective well-being and ill-being in a German panel dataset and tested the mediating effect of flexible goal adjustment in a path model. Our results show a statistically significant positive effect of self-efficacy and optimism on subjective well-being as well as a statistically significant negative effect of optimism on depression over three years. All three predictors show a statistically significant relation with flexible goal adjustment, but flexible goal adjustment did not mediate the effect on subjective well-being or depression.

Fig 1. Path model of the longitudinal relation of self-efficacy, optimism and hope with well-being and depression, mediated by flexible goal-adjustment.

Regression weights are standardized beta-weights, ^a critical health event is coded no/yes; ^b sex is coded male/female;.* p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001.