How does the Belgian workplace shape the access to, sustainment of, and mobilization of Psychological Capital for Muslim women?

Details

Supervisors

Dóci, Edina

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [60] en sciences de gestion

Abstract

enThe thesis investigates how psychological capital (PsyCap), as theorized by Luthans et al. (2007), is accessed, sustained and mobilized by Muslim women in Belgian workplaces, and the structural conditions under which this mobilization occurs. The standard PsyCap framework treats hope, self-efficacy, resilience, and optimism as individual attributes to be measured, trained, and improved through targeted interventions. By adopting an intersectional and structural approach, the analysis examines how gendered, religious, ethnic and class-based markers interact to shape the conditions under which Muslim women in Belgian workplaces access PsyCap, sustain it under daily professional pressure, and mobilize it across their careers. This study addresses this gap through a qualitative inquiry based on fifteen semi-structured interviews conducted with Muslim women employed across the French-speaking Belgian labor market. Data were analyzed thematically following Braun and Clarke (2006), combining deductive coding anchored in the four PsyCap dimensions with inductive coding designed to surface cross-cutting mechanisms from the transcripts. The thesis develops a theoretical framework integrating insights from organizational behavior, sociology, and postcolonial theory to analyze the identity labor through which PsyCap is sustained under structural constraint.