Psychosocial Safety Climate: A New Work Stress Theory and Implications for Method

This book responds to a public health priority (Whiteford et al., 2013) and a call from the WHO (2016), ILO (2016) and OECD (2012) to prevent and manage mental ill-health and promote health and well-being by drawing attention to the connection between work and mental health. By demonstrating a link between work factors and mental health-related issues, this book will provide public policy makers with evidence needed to shift policy attention to create mentally healthy workplaces and move investment of health, compensation, and insurance funding into proactive prevention strategies rather than costly treatments, medications, therapy, and hospitalisation. Ensuring workplaces globally have the conditions for good worker mental health is essential for the achievement of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its Sustainable Development Goal of employment and decent work for all. However work factors must be considered in their context. In Politics of the Mind, Marxism and Mental Health, Ferguson (2017) highlighted the link between the + economic, social and political system we live under—capitalism—and the extremely high levels of distress evident in the world today. In this chapter we consider worker mental health by exploring theories that emphasise the economic, social and political system, the corporate climate, work design, social-relational factors, person-environment fit, and individual psychology. Work stress theoretical frameworks have evolved to explain why work stress occurs, and the consequential negative outcomes, and they may be differentiated by their emphasis on the organisational, job design, or individual factors. It is important to understand the assumptions of the major aetiological frameworks and ideologies concerning the origin of the work stress problem, because this has implications regarding how and where to intervene. In this chapter we introduce various theoretical accounts of work stress, and Psychosocial Safety Climate (PSC) theory. We identify propositions and gaps in the PSC literature, linking them to the chapters in the book that provide some evidence for these new propositions.