Organizational context matters: Psychosocial safety climate as a precursor to team and individual motivational functioning

Beyond its function to protect worker psychological health, psychosocial safety climate (PSC) may be construed as a context factor that affects employee work motivation. This study explores the effect of PSC on various aspects of motivational functioning at work. We expected PSC to be positively related to wellbeing-related outcomes (work engagement and organizational commitment) and that these relations would be mediated through job resources and job crafting, and that they would be evident at both the individual and team level.

Multilevel mediation analysis was used with data from 963 health professionals (doctors and nurses) from 66 work units in two Chinese hospitals. At the individual level, there were significant effects of, individual resources on work engagement and organizational commitment through individual crafting; PSC through individual resources on individual crafting, and PSC through individual crafting on work engagement and organizational commitment. At the team level, team resources were related to average team work engagement and organizational commitment through team crafting; PSC was related to team crafting through team resources, and the indirect effects of PSC through team crafting on average work engagement and organizational commitment were significant.

Overall, the results support the proposition that the PSC context positively predicts team- and individual-level work motivation. We conclude that PSC theory can serve as an integrative contextual framework to explain the complex interplay of factors from different sources (i.e., the team and the individual) that contribute to work motivation.