PSC; Current Status and Implications for Future Research

Abstract

The present chapter reviews all previous chapters of this book. Overall, the chapters offered many new perspectives on PSC research and practice. The validity and usefulness of the PSC concept was applied in Malaysia, Australia, and Iran, and for the first time in Canada and Germany, and in occupations (humanitarian work, university personnel) not investigated previously. This has been demonstrated in a series of qualitative studies (Biron et al., 2019, Chap. 15; Ertel and Formazin, 2019, Chap. 13; Loh et al., 2019, Chap. 9; Potter et al., 2019, Chap. 10). Several chapters introduced new conceptual or measurement related ideas, including the PSC as part of the broader concept of organisational resilience (Taylor et al., 2019, Chap. 8) which serves as a resource passageway, corruption as a precursor to PSC (Dollard and Jain, 2019, Chap. 3), the rank-dependency of PSC perceptions (McCusker and Dollard, 2019, Chap. 14), the use of cognitive interviewing in translating and adapting PSC measures (Ertel and Formazin, 2019, Chap. 13), and the introduction of PSC Ideal, which was defined as PSC mean level divided by PSC standard deviation (Afsharian et al., 2019, Chap. 11). Other chapters employed new or very rarely used research designs and analytical strategies including the analysis of non-overlapping subsamples (McCusker and Dollard, 2019, Chap. 14), or diary designs and mediation analysis (Schulte-Braucks and Dormann, 2019, Chap. 12). Finally, the range of outcomes of PSC has been substantially extended by investigating boredom (Krasniqi et al., 2019, Chap. 5), reaction time in change detection (i.e. cognitive decline, Wilton et al., 2019), personal initiative (Lee and Idris, 2019, Chap. 6), and illegitimate tasks and worrying (Schulte-Braucks and Dormann, 2019, Chap. 12). Based on these chapters, this concluding chapter furthers a couple of new propositions. Based on Conservation of Resources theory, we propose PSC to be a component of workplace ecology that creates a pool of resources for the workers by acting as a resource passageway. We also propose that it should be possible to empirically identify leadership for psychosocial safety (i.e., LPS) and that LPS provides a better explanation for the emergence of PSC rather than more general leadership patterns such as transformational leadership. We also call for more longitudinal research, in particular outside Australia and Malaysia, and with shorter time lags than those used before. Future research should also aim at better understanding how PSC works as an upstream as well as a downstream factor, and analyze variables above and beyond the primary variables of the JD-R model. Although PSC might be universally important, solid evidence and benchmarks for low PSC indicating poor working conditions and mental health at risk still have to become a reality to better establish standards of psychosocial health in legislation and policies.