Transforming psychological capital and flow experience of R&D employees into performance

Flow experience has not yet been fully addressed in the field of psychological capital (PsyCap) research. This paper finds that flow experience is an important positive psychological capacity which should be considered for inclusion into PsyCap. Based on the investigation of R&D employees, the results show the expanded PsyCap integrated with flow experience has good tested reliability and validity. It is revealed expanded PsyCap has strong predictive power on employee performance than original PsyCap (represented by Luthans' HERO model). Flow experience contributes to PsyCap with the emotional attributes resulting in the incremental effect of PsyCap. This paper also discusses motivating R&D workforce by leveraging expanded PsyCap.