How psychosocial safety climate affects employee well-being via basic psychological needs: A longitudinal multilevel moderated mediation study.

To create a more humane and sustainable workplace that upholds humanistic values alongside economic goals, it is critical to understand how organizations can effectively support employee well-being. Integrating self-determination theory within the psychosocial safety climate (PSC) framework, this study investigates (a) the core mechanism by which PSC supports employee well-being through basic psychological needs and (b) the organizational contexts in which this mechanism operates most effectively. Using a multilevel, cross-lagged panel model with three waves of data from 983 employees across 59 organizations, we decomposed PSC into between- and within-organization components. We investigated (a) within-organization mediation pathways, with need satisfaction and frustration mediating the relationships between individual PSC and work engagement and emotional exhaustion, respectively, and (b) between-organization contextual influences, testing how organizational-level PSC (i.e., PSC level and its interaction with PSC strength) moderates these indirect pathways. At the within-organization level, PSC was positively and indirectly related to work engagement through need satisfaction and negatively and indirectly related to emotional exhaustion via need frustration. At the between-organization level, PSC level and its interaction with PSC strength significantly moderated these relationships. Particularly, higher organizational PSC levels amplified the positive indirect relationship between individual PSC and work engagement, whereas the negative indirect relationship between individual PSC and emotional exhaustion was strongest in organizations characterized by both lower PSC levels and higher PSC strength. This study illustrates the multilevel role of PSC in promoting and sustaining employee well-being by supporting inherent human tendencies toward psychological need fulfillment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).