Abstract
Occupational health researchers have begun to realize that the psychological well-being of healthcare workers who are providing treatment against COVID-19 is deteriorating. However, there is minimal research conducted on it, particularly in the context of leadership. The current study aims to fill this important gap by identifying critical factors that can enhance the psychological well-being of healthcare workers. We proposed that safety specific transformational leadership enhances psychological well-being among healthcare workers, and COVID-19 perceived risk mediates this relationship. Furthermore, the safety conscientiousness of healthcare workers was proposed to be a boundary condition that enhances the negative relationship between safety-specific transformational leadership and COVID-19 perceived risk. Data were collected from healthcare workers (N = 232) treating COVID-19 patients in the hospitals of Pakistan through well-established adopted questionnaires. The discriminant and convergent validity of the data was tested through confirmatory factor analysis by using AMOS statistical package. The mediation and moderation hypotheses were tested by using PROCESS Macro by Hayes. The results showed that safety specific transformational leadership enhances psychological well-being among healthcare workers, and COVID-19 perceived risk mediates this relationship. Moderation results also confirmed that safety conscientiousness moderates the relationship between safety specific transformational leadership and COVID-19 perceived risk. This study offers implications for both researchers and practitioners.
Highlights
The world is facing one of the worst pandemics in the history of mankind (Balkhair, 2020)
The current study investigates the impact of safety specific transformational leadership on the psychological well-being of healthcare workers by taking into account the mediating role of COVID-19 perceived risk
We believe that safety specific transformational leadership, due to its enhanced focus on safety combined with employee safety consciousness, make hospitals high reliability organizations by minimizing COVID-19 perceived risk and improving the psychological well-being of healthcare workers
Summary
The world is facing one of the worst pandemics in the history of mankind (Balkhair, 2020). We believe that safety specific transformational leadership, due to its enhanced focus on safety combined with employee safety consciousness, make hospitals high reliability organizations by minimizing COVID-19 perceived risk and improving the psychological well-being of healthcare workers. The moderating role of safety consciousness between safety specific transformational leadership and COVID-19 perceived risk gets its support from high reliability organizational theory, which focuses on risk prevention at the workplace (Roberts, 1990; La Porte, 1996) According to this theory, high reliability organizations are those organizations in which leaders take solid actions to minimize occupational risks and hazards by developing an action plan and following strict guidelines to enhance safety (Sujan, 2017). H3: Safety consciousness moderates the relationship between safety specific transformational leadership and COVID-19 perceived risk such that the negative relationship will be stronger in case of high safety consciousness and weaker in case of low safety consciousness
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