‘Is Psychological Capital Conditional on Age?’: Role of Meaningful Work and Leadership

This study investigates the role of an employee’s age on the development of PsyCap through moderated mediation analysis. It extends by exploring various work characteristics, such as job resource (transformational leadership) and cognitive resource (meaningful work), in the motivational process of the job demand–resource model of psychological capital (PsyCap) at work. The sample of 350 IT/ITeS employees recruited using a purposive sampling technique belonged to major IT hubs in India. The results disconfirm the moderated mediation of an employee’s age on PsyCap; however, it emerges as a statistically significant moderator influencing perceptions of transformational leadership at work culminating into PsyCap. Cognitive resource of meaningful work also emerges as a crucial mediator in the relationship between transformational leadership and PsyCap. The novelty of the finding is attributed to the fact that an increase in age may not always promise increased maturity and ability to draw meaningful inferences, yet it may radically shift perceptions of various job resources and, consequently, hopefulness, optimism, resilience and efficacy related to their organisation. It broadens the scope of organisational literature by conjecturing the developmental perspective to the shift in the importance of different resources over time.