The Moderating Role of Positive Psychological Capital in the Relationship Between Social Undermining and Identification in The Workplace

Social undermining at the workplace is a major threat to the welfare of employees, especially in the education sector, where social bonds are crucial. This paper examines how supervisor and coworker undermining affects the individual identification among education personnel in the Al-Qadisiyah Ed-ucation Directorate, Iraq. Based on the Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, the study also ex-amines the moderating effect of Psychological Capital (PsyCap) dimensions, which are Self-Efficacy, Hope, Optimism, and Resilience. The samples were purposively selected and consisted of 325 staff members whose data were collected by a purposive sampling approach and analyzed by the Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) with SmartPLS 4. The findings indicate that supervisor and co-worker social undermining are strong contributors to the decrease of staff identification. Nonetheless, moderation analysis underscores the defensive strength of the personal resources. Resilience was found to be a universal buffer-moderator, which reduced the adverse impacts of super-visor and colleague undermining. Self-efficacy buffered against supervisor undermining, whereas Hope and Optimism moderated against coworker undermining. The findings are informative to the literature in that they prove that although workplace toxicity undermines a sense of identification, individuals can be defended against these negative outcomes by specific psychological strengths. The paper recommends that learning institutions ought to proactively develop PsyCap in order to have a more resilient and interconnected labor force.