Severing the health-impairment chain: Psychological distress and cross-level safety climate associations with safety behavior

Work in high-risk industries requires employees to follow technical procedures closely while operating in hazardous environments. Drawing on the health-impairment pathway of the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) framework and Situational Strength Theory, this study examines whether three core hindrance stressors-workload, lack of autonomy, and role ambiguity-are associated with employees' safety behavior through psychological distress. We also examine whether team safety climate, as a cross-level contextual condition, shapes this relationship. Using a three-wave time-lagged field design with 466 elevator technicians nested within 61 teams, we tested a multilevel moderated mediation model. The results showed that psychological distress mediated the associations between each job stressor and safety behavior, including both safety compliance and safety participation. In addition, team safety climate moderated the relationship between psychological distress and safety behavior, such that the negative association was weaker in teams with a strong safety climate. As a result, the indirect associations between job stressors and safety behavior through psychological distress were no longer significant under conditions of high team safety climate. These findings identify psychological distress as an important proximal mechanism linking job stressors to safety behavior and suggest that team safety climate can reduce the extent to which distress is reflected in unsafe behavior in high-risk work.