Psychosocial safety climate as a mediator between high-performance work practices and service recovery performance: an international study in the airline industry

Responding to calls for further investigation of the HRM ‘black box’, our paper examines how psychosocial safety climate (PSC), an important but understudied form of organizational climate, mediates the relationship between ability, motivation and opportunity (AMO)-enhancing HPWPs and service recovery performance (SRP). We conducted a quantitative survey amongst flight attendants in Canada, Germany and France, which yielded 1664 valid answers. Using AMOS software V.24, the structural equation method was used to test our model. The method of Monte Carlo (parametric bootstrap) and more precisely bias corrected percentile method was used to test the mediation mechanism, based on 5,000 bootstrapping and 95% confidence intervals. Our results show that each AMO-enhancing HR bundle directly influences PSC and indirectly influences SRP via PSC. They also reveal a direct relationship between PSC and SRP.