Psychosocial Safety Climate, Work Conditions, and Emotions in the Workplace: A Malaysian Population-Based Work Stress Study

We integrated psychosocial safety climate (PSC) with the job demands and resources (JD-R; Bakker & Demerouti, 2007) framework to examine the impact of both job demands and job resources at work on employee depression, anger, and engagement. PSC refers to a climate for the protection of employee psychological health and safety. As PSC theoretically influences the working environment, we hypothesized that PSC would have an indirect effect on specific negative emotions (e.g., anger, depression) via job demands and an indirect effect on positive emotion (e.g., engagement) through job resources. We used a population-based sample consisting of 269 public and private employees from the State of Selangor, Malaysia. Overall, results using structural equation modeling showed that PSC negatively related to job demands and positively related to job resources. In mediated paths, job demands carried the effect of PSC on anger and depression, whereas job resources carried the effect of PSC on engagement. We also showed that job demands related negatively to engagement, and that the effect was carried by anger and depression. Using multigroup analysis, we found that the model was invariant within both the public and private sectors. These findings suggest that JD-R theory may be expanded to include PSC as an antecedent, and that the PSC model is largely valid in an Eastern, Muslim, developing economy setting.