University Librarians' Psychological Capital:Definition,M easurement and Validity

Psychological capital is a positive psychological abilities combination.The combination includes a series of POB( positive organizational behavior) that staff should own and it brings positive influence to staff working performance.Nowadays new information technology is being applied faster and faster and trans-industrial competitions are more and more serious.Under this situation,university libraries are facing unprecedented challenges ever.University librarians are direct provider of information service and core power that manages university libraries' three main sources.Thus to utmost inspire university librarians' subjective initiatives is the key to keep sustainable development for university libraries.However academia is not putting sufficient care on university librarians' psychological capital.What detailed contents that university librarians' psychological capital should cover and how to measure are all questions should be solved.This study is aimed at discovering the intension,structure and effectiveness of university librarians' psychological capital.This paper is written on the basis of one-to-one interviews from 25 different university librarians of 23 universities.This study induces the content and structure of university librarians psychological capital,explores initial project pool of university librarians psychological capital.This study is based on 211 questionnaires from 8 universities.This study analyses and finds that university librarians capital includes 8 dimensions of confidence,hope,toughness,modesty,optimism,ambition,honor and devotion.This conclusion is made through exploratory factor analyzing revealing university librarians psychological capital structure.Afterwards we collect 695 effective questionnaires from 26 universities' librarians and carry outproving factor analyzing.The analysis result proves that the 8 dimensions structure of university librarians psychological capital possesses ideal converging validity and distinguishing validity,and university librarians psychological capital is a high order construct.This study also investigates the influence that university librarians psychological capital brings to their working results.Clear proportional relation is found between psychological capital and university librarians' working satisfaction degree,emotion promise,working devotion and career satisfaction degree.It means university librarians psychological capital owns good criterion validity.As an exploratory study,it has some limitations.Firstly this study is only carried out among some university librarians,which may affect representativeness of sample.Future study may be carried out in larger group for further validity.Secondly this study does not consider other types of libraries and future study may validate if university librarians psychological capital is workable for other types of librarians.The feature of this study locates at comprehensive documents review and personal interviews.Also it defines the intension of university librarians psychological capital,explores and proves the structure of university librarians psychological capital,explores measuring sheet and validates the criterion validity of university librarians psychological capital.Administrators of university libraries may evaluate university librarians psychological capital situations and carry out effective management via this study results.3 figs.8 tabs.24 refs.