Psychosocial Safety Climate, Psychological Capital, Healthcare SLBs’ Wellbeing and Innovative Behaviour During the COVID 19 Pandemic

Abstract

The innovative behavior of employees is an essential component of successful organizational change, especially during an emergency. COVID 19 is changing the working lives of those employees delivering emergency services, especially healthcare. This study contributes to the search for antecedents of employees’ innovative behavior because most organizational change fails because of poor “buy-in” from them. This paper uses Conservation of Resources theory to examine the impact of Psychosocial Safety Climate (PSC) on employees’ personal psychological coping resources, wellbeing and innovative behavior during the pandemic. PSC refers to the policies and practices that affect workers’ psychological health and safety and captures the extent to which management prioritizes performance ahead of psychological health and safety. The sample comprised 163 Australian doctors, nurses and allied health professionals. Statistical analysis included ANOVAs and structural equation modeling. The findings show that the employees’ perception of PSC, personal psychological resources and wellbeing explains over half of their innovative behavior and PSC and personal psychological resources explain over two-thirds of their wellbeing. Hence, if the public wants transformation, then strategies must involve building employees’ psychological capabilities by improving the quality of workplace support.