Employee well-being represents a key feature of organizational optimal functioning. Recent extensions of the Job Demands-Resources Model to the multilevel framework suggested that multiple job demands and job resources may simultaneously operate in shaping employees' well-being across multiple levels of the organizational system. Individual perceptions of policies, procedures and practices of the organization (i.e., psychological climate) are generally associated with employee well-being. Similarly, the common elements of such perceptions, emerging from the social interactions among members of the organization (i.e., organizational climate), are supposed to affect work affective experiences.
However, research in this area is scarce and many issues remain uninvestigated. First, it is unclear to what extent employee well-being may vary as a function of individual and organizational differences. Second, it is still unclear how organizational climate relates to its individual-level counterpart. Third, a lack of evidence regards how multiple psychological and organizational facet-specific climates can simultaneously affect employee well-being. Fourth, studies comparing the magnitude of such effects across multiple levels of analysis are still very scarce.
Adopting a multilevel research design, the present research aims to fill this gap, investigating job insecurity and for safety climates representing, respectively, one job demand and one job resource operating at both levels of analyses in shaping job satisfaction and job-related affective well-being (see FIGURE1). We expect that 1) dimensions of employee's well-being are dependent by individual differences 2) a nontrivial proportion of their variability may be attributable to organizational differences 3) the facet-specific climates will be isomorphic across the two levels of analysis 4) job insecurity and safety climate will affect both job satisfaction and job-related affective well-being at each level of analysis.
This research project may provide a valuable contribution to both theory and practice. From a theoretical point of view, the complex set of hypotheses posited by our overarching conceptual model represents a further step for the extension of the JD-R model within the multilevel perspective. Specifically, the posited nomological structure would allow for the integration of the JD-R principles with the multilevel climate perspective, since it would be one of the few attempts to evaluate simultaneously the conjoint effect of different psychological and organizational facet-specific climates at different levels of analysis on key outcomes of employees's well-being. Moreover, the present research project would add a relevant contribution to clarifying the 'ontological' status of our two organizational facet-specific climates with regards to their individual counterpart. Indeed, while most of the research took for granted the interpretation of organizational aggregates of individual scores on psychological climate measures as actual indicators of organizational climate, this research would provide the opportunity for empirically testing this general (implicit) assumption. Moreover, the present research would shed light on the dual role that our key constructs may play at different levels. Indeed, we hypothesized that the influence of our key climate dimensions on employee affective well-being is not confined exclusively to the individual or to the organizational level. Rather, we expect that such facet-specific climate dimensions may exert their influence simultaneously on both levels of analysis. Specifically, individual perceptions regarding organizational policies, practices, and procedures concerned with employees' job insecurity and their psychological safety are supposed to exert a significant impact on employee well-being, as well as the shared element of such perceptions among employees belonging to a common organizational context are expected to reflect an additional source of influence of our key outcomes above and beyond individual differences.
Employers and practitioners would benefit from the results of our research project in several ways. On the one hand, the hypothesized results (if supported by the data) may serve as an important platform for planning interventions aimed at reducing job insecurity climate and improving the physical safety climate at the organizational level. This aspect would be of paramount importance for employee well-being, especially because organizational interventions for promoting employee well-being and preventing work-related stress are typically less expensive and more effective than those targeted at the employee level (Karasek, 2004).