Buffering the blow of incivility: Psychological resilience and psychosocial safety climate as safeguards of work engagement

Integrating Conservation of Resources (COR) theory and the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model, this study examines how and under what conditions workplace incivility undermines employee work engagement within the high-interaction service sector. Adopting a cross-sectional survey design, this study collected data from 403 service-sector employees in Vietnam and employed Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) to test a complex moderated-mediation framework. The findings reveal that workplace incivility has a significant negative impact on employees' work engagement, and this relationship is indirectly transmitted through reduced psychological resilience. More importantly, this study identifies psychosocial safety climate as a pivotal organizational moderator; specifically, the indirect effect of incivility via resilience is significantly amplified in environments characterized by low psychosocial safety climate. The primary novelty of this research lies in its integrated dual-resource perspective, which demonstrates how the interplay between personal psychological assets and organizational safety climates determines employees’ vulnerability to interpersonal stressors. These insights extend the incivility literature by moving beyond simple direct effects to a more nuanced, resource-based boundary framework. Practically, the results underscore that mitigating incivility requires a multi-level approach—combining individual resilience-building with systemic enhancements to the psychosocial safety climate to protect human capital in demanding service environments.