Proactive Personality and Academic Performance Among Undergraduate Students: The Mediating Role of Psychological Capital

The main aim of this study is to examine the mediating effect of psychological capital (PsyCap) on the relationship between proactive personality and academic performance among undergraduates. A quantitative approach with a cross-sectional study was employed. The sample consisted of 390 undergraduate students from Malaysian private universities. Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modeling was used to confirm the proposed research model and test the hypotheses. Results revealed that proactive personality explained a significant proportion of the variance in PsyCap. Further, PsyCap partially mediated the relationship between proactive personality and academic performance. This study concluded that PsyCap could serve as personal resource to improve students' academic performance. The findings of this study offer valuable theoretical and practical implications. The university's management and academic staff need to work together to design effective training interventions and activities that can promote undergraduates' proactive personality and PsyCap. This study aims to examine and understand how proactive personality and psychological capital of undergraduate students influence its academic performance. A total of 390 students participated in the survey. The data was analyzed using Smart PLS software version 3. The proposed model and hypotheses were confirmed using Partial Least Square structural equation modeling. Results indicate that psychological capital partially mediates the relationship between proactive personality and academic performance among undergraduate students. Thus, this study provides several insights to various stakeholders such as lecturers/instructors, students and university's management on how to improve student performance.