Employment Equity Psychological Safety Of An Organization

Second, this study introduces another psychological safety’s dimension in this study, which is called as employment equity psychological safety. Employment equity psychological safety actually relates to employee psychological safety in the specific contexts, such as discrimination based on religious belief, ethnicity or gender (Feild & Holley, 1982; Ghumman et al., 2013; Heslin et al., 2012; Makin & Winder, 2008). This dimension describes about psychological safety of an employee for not being rejected and being treated equally by his/her co-workers and managers when he/she has different characteristics, such as gender, religious beliefs or ethnicity. According to Makin and Winder (2008), discrimination on the basis or gender, sexuality, religious beliefs and bullying (i.e. racial harassment) becomes one of the sources of hazard for people in an organisation (p. 937). Moreover, Feild and Holley (1982) reveal that one of the sources of discrimination is discrimination on the basis of race, creed, sex, national origin, or age (p.394). Hence, when an employee has got these such of discriminations, it will affect the employee’s safety psychologically.

Furthermore, Braeken, Niven, and Wood (2013) emphasise that workplace discrimination could be happened in the form of systematic denial of people’s rights, such as gender, religious belief, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation and etc. They argue that the denial can be formed, such as workplace violence, bullying, incivility, abusive action from supervisor and etc. Moreover, del Carmen Triana, Kim, and García (2011) assert that perceived discrimination against minorities relates to citizenship behavior toward minorities. They argue that discrimination against minorities is a discriminat...

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... punish them for speaking up (Huang, Chu, & Jiang, 2008). In other words, when an employee expect that his/her team members will treat him/her with respect, he/she will have a better team psychological safety Schulte, Cohen, and Klein (2010). In addition, to measure this safety feeling, there are some indicators can be employed, such as my team members support each other (Carmeli, 2007; Edmondson, 1999). However, some authors, such as May et al. (2004) and Huang et al. (2008) emphasise that literature on team psychological safety and its antecedents are relatively limited in the previous studies. Hence, it may argue that more studies are needed on this topic. In accordance with the above discussion, this study employs team psychological safety as a dimension of psychological safety. Hence, the next part examines all psychological safety dimensions’ relationships.