Abstract: Spiritual capital, as a new model of capital driven by individuals’ higher-level motivation and achievement motive, is characterized by a new paradigm of spiritual examination and devotional exploration for continuous growth and fulfillment. Most of the existing researches on employee spiritual capital merely discuss this concept, rather than use a reliable and valid tool to measure it. In the process of upgrading spiritual elements into management behavioral science to further guide management practice, re-investigation and quantitative measurement become crucial. This study builds a measurement system of spiritual capital, develops a multi-dimensional conceptual model of spiritual capital based on the grounded theory with introspection, multiple openness, challenge exploration and transposition and empathy as the central categories to initially verify the content validity of these four dimensions through exploratory factor analysis, and develops a spiritual capital scale including 16 items. PROCESS is used to verify the mechanism of how spiritual capital influences creative problem solving. The results show that cognitive investment and emotional investment mediate the relationship between spiritual capital and creative problem solving, problem-solving demands modulates the indirect effect of spiritual capital on creative problem solving. This study provides new evidence and new findings on the mechanism of how spiritual capital works, and provides meaningful management implications for helping employees effectively improve creative problem solving.

Key words: spiritual capital, grounded theory, multi-dimension construction, creative problem solving