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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Psychosocial Safety Climate as a Factor in Organisational Resilience: Implications for Worker Psychological Health, Resilience, and Engagement

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Organisations are undergoing unprecedented changes in order to survive in a global and fiercely competitive capitalist market. Resilience is the capacity to endure challenges and is an attribute highly sought after in organisations, but is a construct typically theorised at the individual level. We argue that the notion of resilience can be applied at a systems level to the organisational context, and that organisational resilience presages individual resilience. Organisational resilience is defined as the capacity of the organization to cope with challenges through flexible, adaptable, humane, and interactive systems, whilst maintaining the health, individual resilience, and engagement of employees. Using the framework of Job Demands-Resources theory, organisational resilience was theorized as an upstream systems level resource that influences the work context (i.e., job demands, job resources) and, in turn, worker psychological health symptoms (i.e. psychological distress and emotional exhaustion), individual resilience, and work engagement. In a sample of 371 humanitarian service workers, organisational resilience (adaptive management, Psychosocial Safety Climate (PSC), interdepartmental coordination) was negatively related to job demands and positively related to resources, which in turn carried the indirect negative effect of organizational resilience to psychological health symptoms. Organizational resilience was indirectly positively related to individual resilience and engagement via job resources. Individual resilience was distinct from, but related to both psychological health and engagement. Results suggest that tackling resilience as an organisational/system level phenomenon may have wide ranging effects, improving job conditions, reducing psychological health symptoms, and maximising individual resilience and engagement. Focusing on individual resilience may be an ineffective response.