Positive Psychological Capital through a bibliometric review

Abstract

Positive Psychological Capital or PsyCap takes its cue from Martin Seligman's Positive Psychology and, to date, lays the foundations for the orientation of human behaviour, whether individual or group, towards the full positive expression of its potential. It finds its most substantial application in the organisational sphere, as human capital is unique and irreplaceable. This research aims to locate and identify the existing literature on Positive Pychological Capital through bibliometric methodology, Web of Science was relied upon. The search returned a total of 593 articles published from 1997 to 2022. The results were extracted, sorted and processed using Excel. The number of publications has increased since 2011 asserting itself over 10 years, up to 2021, which records almost double the number of publications of the previous years; 2022, in view of the first two months of productivity, already yields records that allow estimating a continuously rising production trend. The most productive author on this topic is Fred Luthans, whose co-authorship network has been identified in this study. Due to Luthans and his closest collaborators, the United States constitutes the most productive geographic area, although a strong poignancy in China is detected, which generates significant productivity data on the object of study and its implications. Business Economics is the area with the highest frequency and only afterwards, with lower frequency, come Psychology and Behavioural Sciences respectively. Looking critically further, it can be deduced how PsyCap is strongly and transversally implicated in different contexts and how, although rooted in Psychology, it finds application in the field of economics and business as a main concern.