Psychosocial Safety Climate from Two Different Cultural Perspectives in the Asia Pacific: Iran and Australia Hospitals

Abstract

Psychosocial safety climate (PSC) may be conceptualised as the organisational practices, policies and procedures for the protection of worker psychological health and safety. To date PSC theory has not been investigated at the boundaries of the Asia Pacific, in Iran, a developing country in the heart of the Middle East. We investigated PSC levels in Iran, and tested the theoretical paths of the extended Job Demands-Resources Model (Dollard and Bakker in J Occup Organ Psychol 83(3):579–599, 2010). The PSC-12 and work environment, emotional exhaustion and engagement scales were translated into Farsi and administered amongst 33 work groups in an Iranian hospital (N = 257), then compared with an Australian sample of hospital employees (N = 239, across 21 work groups). The findings provide evidence that PSC is a climate construct that exists as a group phenomenon cross-culturally; PSC in Iran has group like properties with around 11 % (cf 15 % in Australia) of the variance in PSC due to group-level factors, with high levels of homogeneity of perceptions of PSC within groups (0.92 vs 0.94 Australia). Australian hospital employees reported higher levels of PSC, skill discretion and decision authority, and lower levels of emotional demands, compared to the Iranian sample. Evidence in support of the climate concept also came from the way it behaved in a nomological network of analyses. The major theoretical paths delineated in PSC theory were confirmed in the Iranian data. Multilevel analysis showed that as a between-group effect in Iran and Australia, team PSC was significantly negatively related to psychological demands, and emotional exhaustion and significantly positively related to job resources, decision authority and work engagement. In Australia, an additional significant positive relationship was found between team PSC and higher levels of the job resource, skill discretion. The results support the utility of PSC theory in Iran (at least among hospital workers). Given empirical support also from Australia and Malaysia, we argue that workplace assessment of PSC maybe useful to guide the development of organisational systems to prevent workplace psychosocial risk factors across the Asia Pacific.