From Assessing Workplace Spirituality to Psychological Safety: A Conceptual Framework for Healthcare Professionals’ Well-Being

Background/Objectives: Healthcare organizations are increasingly challenged by workforce shortages, occupational stress, burnout, moral distress, and staff turnover. Workplace spirituality has been associated with positive outcomes among healthcare professionals, including well-being, engagement, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. However, existing research has largely focused on these associations, with less attention to the organizational and interpersonal mechanisms through which workplace spirituality may influence healthcare professionals’ experiences and workforce sustainability. This conceptual paper aims to develop an integrative framework explaining how workplace spirituality may contribute to healthcare professionals’ well-being through interconnected organizational and interpersonal processes. Methods: The paper synthesizes theoretical perspectives and empirical literature from workplace spirituality, spiritual leadership, psychosocial safety climate, psychological safety, meaningful work, Self-Determination Theory, and the Job Demands–Resources model. These perspectives are conceptually integrated to develop a multilevel framework linking workplace spirituality and spiritual leadership with psychosocial safety climate, psychological safety, and healthcare workforce outcomes. Results: The proposed framework conceptualizes workplace spirituality as a multidimensional, value-based psychosocial condition encompassing meaningful work, sense of community, and alignment between individual and organizational values. Spiritual leadership is positioned as an enabling mechanism through which these value-based principles may be translated into organizational priorities and practices. These processes are proposed to contribute to a positive psychosocial safety climate, reflecting organizational commitment to protecting employees’ psychological health. In turn, psychosocial safety climate may provide an organizational foundation for psychological safety within healthcare teams, facilitating open communication, speaking up, error reporting, help-seeking, learning, and adaptive coping. Psychological safety may subsequently contribute to improved well-being, resilience, engagement, and workforce retention, while reducing emotional exhaustion and burnout and potentially supporting patient safety. The strength of these proposed relationships may depend on contextual conditions such as professional hierarchy, workload, emotional demands, and organizational resources. Conclusions: The proposed framework offers a novel conceptual integration of workplace spirituality, spiritual leadership, psychosocial safety climate, and psychological safety into a multilevel explanatory pathway. Rather than treating workplace spirituality as a conventional organizational asset, the framework conceptualizes it as a value-based psychosocial condition that may enable the development and translation of relational and organizational resources. The framework provides a basis for future empirical research examining the proposed pathways, their directionality and boundary conditions, and their potential relevance to healthcare workforce well-being and sustainability.