How psychological capital is related to academic performance, burnout, and boredom? The mediating role of study engagement Delia Vîrgă 1 & Murugan Pattusamy 2 & Dontha Pradeep Kumar 3 Accepted: 30 October 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract Researchers are increasingly interested in how personal characteristics are related to academic performance and whether study engagement has an impact on different experiences in student life. Drawing on Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, this study examines the relationship between psychological capital (PsyCap) and engagement, and, further, the relationship between engagement and performance, boredom, and burnout among university students. Using data gathered from 420 university students (242 responses from India and 178 from Romania), partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) methods showed that study engagement partially mediates the relation between PsyCap and academic performance, and also between PsyCap and burnout or boredom. The present study advances our knowledge about PsyCap and engagement as possible antecedents of university students’ performance, burnout, and boredom, across both samples. Results suggest that developing interventions that strengthen students’ resources by increasing their hope, resilience, self-efficacy, and optimism could foster their study engagement and academic performance and protect them from burnout and boredom. Keywords Psychological capital . Study engagement . Academic performance . Burnout . Boredom Introduction In a global economy, one of the main aims of the teaching staff in universities is to have students engaged in curricular and extra-curricular activities and to increase students’ well-being and academic performance to face challenges, like globaliza- tion of markets or ever-changing technology. In this context, information about the drivers of academic performance and well-being is crucial (Luthans, Luthans, & Palmer, 2016). Based on the Conservation of Resources (COR) theory (Hobfoll, 2001), resources are associated with other resources, forming resource caravans. Thus, students strive to secure and generate personal resources over time, such as psychological capital (PsyCap). Personal resources refer to individuals’ per- ception of their ability to control their environment successfully and are generally linked to resiliency (Hobfoll, 2001). Psychological capital (PsyCap), as a second-order con- struct, combines four personal resources - self-efficacy, opti- mism, resilience, and hope - that interact synergistically (Luthans, Avolio, Avey, & Norman, 2007). Recently, Siu, Bakker, and Jiang (2014) found that PsyCap, as a personal resource, predicted study engagement and vice versa. This research opened a new path for research on PsyCap in an educational context. Thus, during the past few years, there have been some studies that proposed to measure PsyCap in the higher educational context (see Luthans et al., 2016). This study contributes to our knowledge of the relationship between PsyCap and student outcomes (e.g., performance) by focusing on its mediators. Specifically, this study responds to the call of Newman, Ucbasaran, Zhu, and Hirst (2014), who advocated for more research which “is needed to help us un- derstand the underlying mechanisms through which PsyCap influences workplace outcomes” (p. 131). Thus, in an academic context, it needs to develop researches to identify the mecha- nism which links the PsyCap with academic outcomes. These theoretical mechanisms can be explained using synergies rela- tions between and within various psychological resources of PsyCap which create “resource caravans” that act together, rather than in isolation (Hobfoll, 2001), and also lead to * Murugan Pattusamy pmmba@uohyd.ac.in 1 West University of Timisoara, Timisoara, Romania 2 School of Management Studies, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad 500046, India 3 Indian Political Action Committee (IPAC), Hyderabad, India Current Psychology https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-01162-9