Relational Foundations of Sustainable Working Life: A Critical Integrative Review and Multilevel Framework of Trust, Social Competences, and Belonging

Socially sustainable working life requires more than continued employment or short-term performance; it depends on relational conditions that preserve health, voice, inclusion, and capability over time. This critical integrative review examines trust, social competences, belonging, and psychological safety across individual, interactional, team, organisational, and institutional levels. A 70-source seed corpus was audited, 38 non-redundant sources were retained, two nearest-model publications were added, and a documented public update screened 30 candidates identified through PubMed/PMC, EconBiz, publisher and DOI records, and citation chaining. Ten new articles were included, yielding 50 substantive sources. The review compares RFSWL with workplace social sustainability, swAge, capability-based sustainable employability, relational coordination, inclusion, psychological safety, and multilevel trust models. Its contribution is a new integrative configuration rather than new constructs: trust enables warranted vulnerability, social competences enable reciprocal coordination and repair, and belonging enables recognised membership without assimilation. It proposes to explain why favourable relational perceptions can coexist with silence or unequal participation when they fail to become reciprocally enacted and institutionally protected team processes. Through repeated interaction, these foundations may generate team trust climate, relational coordination, inclusive climate, and psychological safety, while governance, work design, employment security, digital control, and status relations condition their effects. Six propositions specify enabling, failure, distributional, and feedback pathways for multilevel longitudinal research.