Testing the relevance, proximal, and distal effects of psychosocial safety climate and social support on job resources: A context-based approach

Abstract

Building on and extending the proximal-distal theoretical framework of motivation, we investigated the relevance of the role and effectiveness of psychosocial safety climate (PSC) and social support as contextual factors in assisting faculty members’ and university students’ cognitive and emotional resources. Three hundred and fifty faculty members (N = 175) and university students (N = 175) from 37 departments of 15 universities in Malaysia participated in this dual-rater multi-level study. Data analysis involved Hierarchical Linear Modeling. Individual-level analyses showed that social support influences faculty members’ and university students’ job resources. Cross-level analyses showed that PSC was effective in providing job resources to faculty members, but only to university students’ emotional resources. Between PSC and social support, PSC showed lesser influence as compared to social support. There was a stronger influence of PSC and social support on the provision of emotional resources to both faculty members and university students as compared to cognitive resources. In conclusion, positive organizational factors such as PSC and social support are important in affecting faculty members and university students’ job resources, especially emotional resources.

Keywords

• psychosocial safety climate
• social support
• job resources
• faculty member
• university student
• malaysia