Psychosocial Safety Climate: A Review of the Evidence

Abstract

Psychosocial Safety Climate (PSC) theory has developed over the past nine years providing a multilevel explanation of the causes of work stress. Previously, individual explanations of occupational stress dominated the research literature including the Job Demands-Control (JD-C) model (Karasek, 1979), the Effort-Reward Imbalance (ERI) model (Siegrist, 1996), and the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model (Demerouti, Bakker, Nachreiner, and Schaufeli, 2001) which all examine how aspects of work design influence individual psychological health or engagement. PSC theory added to these models of individually perceived work conditions by explaining how the climate of an organisation or work group created the work conditions articulated in these models. The advantage of this multilevel approach became evident, as by measuring PSC in an organisation or work group, it was possible to predict the types of work conditions employees were experiencing and in turn whether employees were likely to be highly stressed or engaged. PSC theory was the first multilevel explanation of work stress in the research literature, providing a theoretical model for academics and practitioners to measure, monitor, benchmark and evaluate organisational, team level, and individual causes of work related stress within one conceptual framework.