Positive Psychology at Work: Psychological Capital and Thriving as Pathways to Employee Engagement

As chief executive officers and corporate leaders around the globe seek to truly differentiate their organizations, employee engagement, when grounded in the principals of positive psychology and more deeply explored in positive organizational scholarship, offers a genuine solution. This paper defines employee engagement, its history and its grounding in positive psychology. Further it explains how two constructs, Psychological Capital and Thriving, provide a point of entry for organizations to increase the emergence of employee engagement. Finally, it discusses how the organization that leverages these two constructs as a means to enhance the engagement of their individual employees has the potential to influence not only the individual employee, but also the wider organization, to the benefit of economic performance