We’re Not Gonna Fall: Depressive Complaints, Personal Resilience, Team Social Climate, and Worries about Infections among Hospital Workers during a Pandemic

Maintaining hospital workers’ psychological health is essential for hospitals’ capacities to sustain organizational functioning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Workers’ personal resilience can be an important factor in preserving psychological health, but how this exactly works in high stakes situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, requires further exploration. Similarly, the role of team social climate as contributor to individual psychological health seems obvious, but how it exactly prevents workers from developing depressive complaints in prolonged crises remains under investigated. The present paper therefore applies conservation of resources theory to study the relationships between resilience, team social climate, and depressive complaints, specifically focusing on worries about infections as an important explanatory mechanism. Based on questionnaire data of 1126 workers from five hospitals in the Netherlands during the second peak of the pandemic, this paper estimates a moderated-mediation model. This model shows that personal resilience negatively relates to depressive complaints (β = −0.99, p < 0.001, 95%CI = −1.45–−0.53), partially as personal resilience is negatively associated with worries about infections (β = −0.42, p < 0.001, 95%CI = −0.50–−0.33) which in turn are positively related to depressive complaints (β = 0.75, p < 0.001, 95% CI = 0.31–1.19). Additionally, team social climate is associated with a lower effect of worries about being infected and infecting others on depressive complaints (β = −0.88, p = 0.03, 95% CI = −1.68–−0.09). These findings suggest that resilience can be an important individual level resource in preventing depressive complaints. Moreover, the findings imply that hospitals have an important responsibility to maintain a good team social climate to shield workers from infection related worries building up to depressive complaints.