Since the government-supported institutes were established in 1970s, the institutes have played an important role in the development of science and technology as well as industry in our country. Nevertheless, the institutes has recently been requested to create more performance and challenged to reform their roles and responsibilities. The one of old issues over the institutes is research autonomy, which is considered as the most important factor for improving the performance of the institutes.
A lot of studies on the institutes have been done past decade, and the studies have mainly focused on organizational levels such as patents, evaluation, budgeting, research management, regulations, and so on. There are rarely on individual levels such as positive psychology, research autonomy and organizational justice which are perceived by the employees of the institute.
The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of organizational justice and research autonomy on the positive psychological capital which are perceived by the employees of the institutes, and also the effect of positive psychological capital on their job performance. The research autonomy and organizational justice have been set as independent variables of positive psychological capital. The organizational justice is divided into two elements, distributional justice and interactional justice. The positive psychological capital is classified into four sub-factors such as self-efficacy, hope, optimism, and resilience. In addition, job performance, which is a dependent variable, is divided into task performance and adaptive performance. The hypothesis of this study was designed with these variables. The questionnaire survey was conducted for the regular employees of all 13 institutes located at the Daedeok Science Town.
The results of hypothesis verification are as follows. First, organizational justice has a positive effect on positive psychological capital. However, the interactional justice has no significant relationship with self-efficacy and resilience. Second, research autonomy positively affects positive psychological capital. Third, positive psychological capital has a positive effect on job performance. Implications of this study can be summarized as follows. In order to enhance the performance of the institutes, it is necessary to foster positive psychological capital of employees through education and training, and to increase organizational justice and research autonomy.