Predicting Sustainable Employability in Swedish Healthcare: The Complexity of Social Job Resources

Achieving sustainable employability (SE), i.e., when employees are able to continue working in a productive, satisfactory, and healthy manner, is a timely challenge for healthcare. Because healthcare is a female-dominated sector, our paper investigated the role of social job resources in promoting SE. To better illustrate the complexity of the organizational environment, we incorporated resources that operate at different levels (individual, group) and in different planes (horizontal, vertical): trust (individual-vertical), teamwork (group-horizontal), and transformational leadership (group-vertical). Based on the job demands-resources model, we predicted that these resources initiate the motivational process and thus promote SE. To test these predictions, we conducted a 3-wave study in 42 units of a healthcare organization in Sweden. The final study sample consisted of 269 professionals. The results of the multilevel analyses demonstrated that, at the individual level, vertical trust was positively related to all three facets of SE. Next, at the group level, teamwork had a positive link with employee health and productivity, while transformational leadership was negatively related to productivity. These findings underline the importance of acknowledging the levels and planes at which social job resources operate to more accurately capture the complexity of organizational phenomena and to design interventions that target the right level of the environment.