Search Results (9)

Under intensified downward economic pressures on the economy, technological innovation is playing a pivotal role in the development of Chinese enterprises. Employees’ psychological safety significantly influences their innovative behaviors, as a climate of psychological safety fosters greater willingness among staff to engage in voice behaviors. Guanxi with a team leader may decrease this effect. This study analyzed survey data from 263 employees of China’s private manufacturing enterprises to explore the moderating role of guanxi with a team leader in the relationship between psychological safety climate and voice behavior. Results showed that psychological safety climate was positively correlated with promotive and prohibitive voices, and employees with a higher psychological safety climate were more likely to develop voice behavior. Guanxi with team leaders negatively moderated the relationship between psychological safety climate and promotive and prohibitive voices, and the association between psychological safety climate and promotive and prohibitive voices was strong when guanxi with a team leader was weak. This study expands the scope of the application of guanxi, with team leaders as a moderating variable. It helps leaders focus on the psychological safety climate of employees, maintain harmonious and friendly interpersonal relationships with employees, enable employees to spontaneously contribute to the development of the organization, and enhance cohesion in the organization. Full article

In China’s rapidly digitizing IT industry, empowering leadership has become a crucial catalyst for workplace proactivity; however, the mechanisms linking leadership practices to individual proactive behaviors remain underexplored. This study addresses this gap by proposing a multi-level framework that integrates team processes and technological contexts. Based on the job demands–resources theory, the research examines the mechanisms of empowering leadership through parallel team-level pathways and the influence of digital infrastructure on these dynamics. Data were gathered in three phases from 510 employees across 74 teams in seven IT firms. Hierarchical analyses with SPSS 27.0, AMOS 28.0, and HLM 6.08 revealed three pathways: empowering leadership significantly enhances workplace proactivity, with team job crafting and psychological safety serving as sequential mediators. Moreover, access to knowledge via ICT moderates the relationship between team job crafting and workplace proactivity. This study theoretically contests sequential mediation assumptions by demonstrating parallel, non-overlapping mechanisms and redefines ICT’s role as a contextual enhancer in digital workplaces. Practically, it offers organizations a modular strategy: leaders can prioritize either job crafting systems or psychological safety climates to foster proactivity, depending on their team’s technological readiness. These insights offer practical recommendations for optimizing leadership practices in high-pressure IT environments, where digital tools and team dynamics influence employee initiative. Full article

The intelligent transformation of coal mines is one of the current trends in developing China’s coal mining industry. To explore the impact of miners’ insecurity on their safety behavior under this trend, miners’ psychological resilience was introduced as the mediating variable, and team safety climate was used as the moderating variable to conduct a questionnaire survey of frontline miners. The data analysis was carried out using descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, structural equation modeling (SEM), and the fsQCA method to explore the impact of job insecurity on miners’ risk behavior through psychological resilience from the dimensions of job loss insecurity, job performance insecurity, and interpersonal insecurity. The results show that the sense of insecurity of the miners has a significant negative correlation with security behavior and a significant negative correlation with psychological toughness; miners’ psychological resilience plays an intermediary role in the correlation between job loss insecurity and miners’ risk behavior. Meanwhile, team safety climate has a significant moderating effect on the relationship between job insecurity and psychological resilience, as well as the relationship between psychological resilience and safety behavior; that is, a good team safety climate can effectively reduce the negative impact of job insecurity brought about by the transformation and upgrading of coal mines. Full article

Organizational climate is the ascribed psychological meaning and significance associated with the procedures, policies, and practices that are recognized and rewarded in the workplace and, hence, mediate the effects of environmental stimuli on individuals’ responses. Safety climate is a specific organizational climate, i.e., organizational climate for safety. Previous research claimed that organizational climate provides a foundation for safety climate, but without elaboration on the foundational mechanisms. This paper attempts to fill this knowledge gap. As organizational climate is a multi-dimensional phenomenon, this paper chooses two dimensions: perceived organizational support (POS) and participative decision making (PaDM). Drawing on an interactive approach to forming climate perceptions, this paper introduces two interactive constructs—leader–member exchange (LMX) and team-member exchange (TMX)—and establishes a multiple mediation model depicting the foundational effect of organizational climate on safety climate. A random sample of 292 Hong Kong-based construction personnel is used to validate the model. The results show that both POS and PaDM are positively associated with perceived safety climate (β₁ = 0.175, p < 0.01; β₂ = 0.502, p < 0.005), both LMX and TMX fully mediate the effect of PaDM on safety climate (effect sizes are 0.146 and 0.076, respectively), and only LMX partially mediates the effect of POS on safety climate (effect size is 0.131). This study sheds light on the foundational effects of organizational climate on safety climate. POS can improve the quality of reciprocal exchange about safety matters between construction personnel and their supervisors and hence raise construction personnel’s awareness of the priority of safety. PaDM can improve the quality of reciprocal exchange about safety matters vertically and horizontally and hence have construction personnel aware of the importance of safety. In practice, this paper suggests that project managers recognize and reward construction personnel’s contributions in a timely manner, genuinely care about their well-being, and take their suggestions seriously in making decisions. In this way, the quality of both vertical and horizontal exchange about safety matters improves, and a sound and positive safety climate ensues. Full article

As an important outcome of team innovation, team creativity has become an important issue in academia and industry. Meanwhile, the horizontal leadership model has been preliminarily proven to be effective in improving the output of innovation performance. Multiple chain mediating effects of team psychological safety climate, cognitive motivation and social motivation on shared leadership and team creativity in innovative teams were proposed on the basis of social network theory and group dynamics theory. In this study, 178 innovation teams and 2011 innovation team members were given questionnaires, and the obtained data were empirically analyzed. The results show that shared leadership has a significant positive effect on team creativity in innovative teams; team psychological safety climates, cognitive motivation and social motivation play a partial mediating role between shared leadership and team creativity, and play a chain mediating role together. At the team level, the study verifies the positive effect of shared leadership on team creativity and reveals the complex team process. Full article

This study explores whether there is an indirect effect of psychological safety on team effectiveness in management teams, operating through the mediating variable of behavioral integration. Whilst there exists a fair amount of research on the relationship between psychological safety and team effectiveness, few have looked at potential mechanisms that can explain this association in management teams. We propose behavioral integration to be a potential mediator. Data are collected from 1150 leaders in 160 Norwegian management teams, answering a questionnaire measuring team functioning and effectiveness. Team size ranged from 3 to 19 members. Our results show a significant indirect effect of psychological safety on management team effectiveness, mediated by behavioral integration. Thus, the more team members perceive the climate as safe in terms of speaking their mind without the fear of repercussions, the more they partake in mutual collaboration, information sharing and experience ownership in the decisions being made. This is associated with management teams performing better. We also found a positive relationship between psychological safety and behavioral integration, and—in line with previous studies—that psychological safety and behavioral integration both were positively related to team effectiveness. This study adds to the existing team research literature by expanding our knowledge about the importance of psychological safety and the way it influences management team performance at all levels throughout the organizational hierarchy. Full article

This study examines leading psychosocial safety climate (PSC) within the organization and psychological safety in teams in remote work conditions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. These topical working life phenomena have an essential role in health, well-being and productivity in today’s working life, but they have rarely been studied in remote work context. A total of 26 supervisors and leaders at three Finnish universities participated in semi-structured interviews. The data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis, resulting in four main categories: supportive and challenging aspects of leading psychological safety and well-being, supportive and challenging aspects of organizational psychosocial safety climate leadership, support for working as a supervisor, and characteristics specific to working in academia. The results indicate that leading psychological safety remotely requires more time, deliberation and intentionality than when working face to face, and that the role of remote interaction is underlined in it. As to PSC, it is important to improve the cohesion in leading psychological safety and health in academic organizations. How PSC is led in the organizations affects not only the general psychosocial working conditions, but also the possibilities for good leadership of psychological safety in smaller units in the organization. The study makes a novel contribution especially in understanding (1) leadership of PSC and psychological safety in remote work conditions, and (2) the reciprocal relations between leading psychological safety and well-being at the organizational level and the team level. Full article

Remote work has become a new way of working due to the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic, which inevitably aggravates team conflicts caused by cognitive differences given the lack of face-to-face communication. With a team climate perspective, this paper investigates the impact of the team leader’s conflict management style on team innovation performance in remote R&D teams in China based on social cognition theory and two-dimension theory. A theoretical model is constructed which describes the mediating effect of team psychological safety and the moderating impact of team trust. Paired data from 118 remote R&D teams in China including 118 leaders and 446 members were collected. The results show that team leader’s cooperative conflict management style is conducive to enhancing team psychological safety and further effectively improves team innovation performance. Therefore, team psychological safety has a mediating effect between team leader’s cooperative conflict management style and team innovation performance. In addition, team trust has a negative moderating effect between team leader’s cooperative conflict management style and team psychological safety. Besides, this study obtains some valuable culture-related insights and provides more views for conflict management research in the cross-cultural context since the samples in this study are from China, a society with high collectivism, which is different from the western cultural context from which many conflict management theories develop. Full article

Safety attitude is of vital importance to accident prevention, and the high accident rate in the coal mining industry makes it urgent to undertake research on coal miners’ safety attitude. However, the current literature still lacks a valid and reliable safety attitude measurement scale for coal miners, which stands as a barrier against their safety attitude improvement. In this study, a scale is developed that can be used to measure coal miners’ safety attitude. The preliminary scale was based on an extended literature review. Empirical data were then collected from 725 coal miners using the preliminary scale. Both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were undertaken to validate and improve the scale. The final scale, which consists of 17 items, contains four dimensions: management safety commitment, team safety climate, fatalism and work pressure. Results show that this safety attitude scale can effectively measure the safety attitude of coal miners, showing high psychological measurement validity. This paper contributes to the occupational safety research by developing the factor structure and indicator system of coal miners’ safety attitude, thus providing more profound interpretation of this crucial construct in the safety research domain. The measurement scale serves as an important tool for safety attitude benchmarking among different coal mining enterprises and, thus, can boost the overall safety improvement of the whole industry. These findings can facilitate improvement of both theories and practices related to occupational safety attitude. Full article