ORGANIZATIONAL FACTORS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY OF EMPLOYEES

Abstract

Psychological safety of employees is very important for organization functioning and development as it contributes to improved team performance, job involvement, sharing information and knowledge, ensuring their strong desire to continue working and developing in the organization where they work. The purpose of the study is to reveal the organizational factors of psychological safety at a job position, that is to determine, which characteristics of internal organizational condition affect the employees’ perceptions and feelings about a workplace safety. Scientific novelty. This study was carried out to examine the effects of organizational factors on the psychological safety of employees in the workplace. Psychological safety is regarded as a state of preservation of mind that involves maintaining a balance between the negative effects of the environment and a person’s resilience, that is, the ability to overcome such effects. In the structure of psychological safety of the organization member three components were identified: 1) the cognitive component – beliefs of employee about parameters of the professional environment in terms of real and potential threats and his/her own abilities to cope with them; 2) the emotional component – a feeling of being protected from the threats that go from the professional environment. The resulting assessment has emotional shades and can be characterized by dichotomies such as “safe-dangerous”, “good-bad”, “comfortable-uncomfortable” etc.; 3) component “confidence in the future” – in order to feel safe, it is not enough for an employee to perceive the environment as safe and his own ability to cope with all the challenges successfully today, but also the confidence that the current state of affairs will be maintained tomorrow is important. Conclusions. A questionnaire was offered to the members of business organizations and educational institutions. The results of the study confirmed that such organizational factors as level of organizational culture, working team cohesion, working team self-organization, management style of the immediate supervisor, work autonomy, role ambiguity have positive effect on psychological safety. The results imply the importance of purposeful implementation the company policies aiming improvement of these factors. Key words: organization, worker psychological safety, educational institution, business organization, factor, corporate culture, work autonomy, team cohesion.