Psychological Safety at Local Union Meetings: A Key to Unlock Meeting Attendance

Abstract

We take a psychological view of local union meetings in reference to the problem of chronic low meeting attendance. This view suggests that local meetings are designed to encourage employees to experience safe environments in which they can strive to fulfill psychological needs, examples of which include a need to voice concerns and opinions, a need to participate in decision-making, and a need to be counted as a valued contributor to “our collective effort.” As such, we constructed a model to predict likely meeting attendance informed by literatures on team effectiveness, meeting design, and union participation. Extracting relationships from the cited literature relevant to local meetings, we positioned psychological safety experienced at meetings as a predictor of likely attendance in the next 12 months, with meeting effectiveness as rated by attending employees positioned as a mediator of the relationship. A test of the mediated model based on data collected from employees in 20 unions and 42 locals (N = 132) suggested support for the model, in which the effect of psychological safety on likely attendance was shown to unfold through meeting effectiveness. Future models of local attendance are discussed and an intervention aimed at solving the attendance problem is suggested.