Recently, interest in psychological wellness of workers is growing sharply in our society. One of the various efforts to improve psychological wellness or happiness of workers, is to observe and explain psychological experience of workers through a co...
Recently, interest in psychological wellness of workers is growing sharply in our society. One of the various efforts to improve psychological wellness or happiness of workers, is to observe and explain psychological experience of workers through a construct of flow. Positive psychology as a new paradigm advocated by Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi(2000) can be seen as an example of the kind.
This study was intended to establish explanation mechanism of industrial and organizational psychology about flow experience, one of the core constructs related to psychological wellness of workers, from a perspective of positive psychology. The purpose of this study intend developing the Korean Work Flow Scale and performing a validation study, and thereby identifying the relationships between work flow and antecedents and consequences.
To this end, study 1 defined sub-construct of work flow, investigated work flow related scales, and developed items to measure work flow through open-ended questionnaire and group interview. In regard to the work flow scale developed through such as process, the result of the exploratory factor analysis based on the responses of 508 workers collected from a variety of work fields in Korea revealed that the factor structure of Csikszentmihalyi(1990) was obviously correspondent in the work fields in Korea. Based on the result of study 1, work flow scale consisting of 45-items with 9 factors was presented, satisfying both conceptual and statistical conditions were selected as the final items for measuring work flow.
In study 2, it was confirmed validity of work flow factor structure obtained from study 1, and verified discriminant validity of attitude constructs of industrial and organizational psychology(job engagement, job involvement, organizational commitment) which were previous studied. Aside from those responses used on the exploratory factor analysis, study 2 was based on responses from 508 incumbent workers at various work fields in Korea. First of all, in order to confirm the validity of work flow factor structure, confirmatory factor analysis was performed with AMOS, which supported structure validity of 9 factors obtained from study 1.
Furthermore, as part of construct validation study for the Korean Work Flow Scale, discriminant validity of work flow and other attitude constructs of industrial and organizational psychology(job engagement, job involvement, organizational commitment), was confirmed by means of MTMM(Multitrait-Multimethod). As a result, it was found that as well as work flow, job engagement, job involvement and organizational commitment supporting convergent validity of work flow scale, while discriminant validity of job engagement was relatively lower compared to work flow, job involvement and organizational commitment. In addition, the confirmatory factor analysis confirmed that work flow and other attitude constructs were all obviously discriminated. Also, the result of the investigation of the criterion-related validity of work flow scale verified that it was significantly related to various consequences.
Finally, in study 3, in order to identify the relationships between work flow and antecedents and consequences were performed by correlation analysis, analysis of variance, path analysis and multiple-regression analysis, based on the responses from 1,016 people working at various fields in Korea.
Above all, the result of multiple-regression analysis indicated that job characteristics and transformational leadership were job-related antecedents, it was to examine the relationships between work flow and job-related antecedents, both job characteristics and transformational leadership were found to have relatively stronger impact on work flow than other attitude constructs, while job characteristics had stronger impact than transformational leadership. Also in the relationships between individual-related antecedents and work flow, all the individual-related antecedents had stronger impact on work flow, while personality had more stronger impact than self-efficacy and achievement needs.
In addition, the study investigated work flow and other attitude constructs, affected job-related consequences that was indicated work flow had more stronger impact on task performance, turnover intention and mental health than other attitude constructs, while job engagement had relatively stronger impact on job satisfaction.
Besides, it was examined that work flow and other attitude constructs, affected individual-related consequences such as life satisfaction, and positive and negative affects, the result indicated that work flow had relatively stronger impact on all the individual-related consequences than other attitude constructs.
Finally, the implication of this study is expanded explanation mechanism about positive psychological experience of workers by introducing construct of work flow to the field of industrial and organizational psychology in Korea and provided a useful method for follow-up studies by developing a validate scale based on the data collected at work fields. Based on these results, the implications and limitations of this study were discussed, and the future research directions were suggested.