How safety climate influences the willingness to stay of nursing staff during the COVID-19 outbreak

Abstract

The outbreak of COVID-19 in China at the beginning of 2020 has made the problems that the aged care agency face with large mobility and high turnover of aged nursing staff become more serious. Aiming at this problem, this paper incorporates psychological capital and social panic into the model from the perspective of the organizational safety climate and constructs a theoretical model of the mechanism of the effect on nursing staff’s willingness to stay in the context of the outbreak. Through a questionnaire survey in an aged care agency in Anhui Province, a total of 321 valid questionnaires were collected for empirical analysis. The results show that: (1) the safety climate of the organization has a significant positive impact on the transactional psychological capital and interpersonal psychological capital of nursing staff in the aged care industry and their willingness to stay; (2) transactional psychological capital and social panic have a significant positive impact on the willingness to stay of nursing staff, while interpersonal psychological capital has no significant impact on the willingness to stay; (3) the mediating role of transactional psychological capital and interpersonal psychological capital between the safety climate and the willingness to stay is established, and the moderating role of social panic between psychological capital and willingness to stay is also established. Finally, based on the research conclusions, corresponding countermeasures and suggestions are put forward to deal with the problems that occur in special periods.