How can we decrease burnout and safety workaround behaviors in health care organizations? The role of psychosocial safety climate

Abstract

PurposeConducted with a staff of 562 persons working in the health sector in Quebec, mainly nurses, the purpose of this paper is to test the indirect effects of psychosocial safety climate (PSC) on workarounds through physical fatigue, cognitive weariness and emotional exhaustion as mediators.Design/methodology/approachThe structural equation method, namely CFA, was used to test the structure of constructs, the reliability and validity of the measurement scales as well as model fit. To test the mediation effects, Hayes’s PROCESS (2013) macro and 95 percent confidence intervals were used and 5,000 bootstrapping re-samples were run. The statistical treatments were carried out with the AMOS software V.24 and SPSS v.22.FindingsThe results based on bootstrap analysis and Sobel’s test demonstrate that physical fatigue, cognitive weariness and emotional exhaustion mediate the relationship between PSC and safety workarounds.Practical implicationsThe study has important practical implications in detecting blocks and obstacles in the work processes and decreasing the use of workaround behaviors, or in converting their negative consequences into positive contributions.Originality/valueTo the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the relationship between PSC, burnout and workaround behaviors. These results could contribute to a better understanding of this construct of workarounds and how to deal with it. Moreover, the test of the concepts of PSC in this study provides support for the theory of “conservation of resources” by proposing an extension of this theory.