# The Psychological Conditions of Meaningfulness, Safety and Availability and the Engagement of the Human Spirit at Work

*May, Gilson & Harter · Measurement & Method · Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology · 2004 · Paywalled*

The empirical study that operationalised and tested Kahn's (1990) theory of the psychological conditions of engagement, and so the bridge between Kahn's foundational ethnography (in this corpus) and the measured constructs the field went on to use. In a field study at a US Midwestern insurance company, May, Gilson and Harter examined Kahn's three conditions, psychological meaningfulness, psychological safety, and psychological availability, as mediators between features of the work and workplace and employees' engagement in their roles. All three conditions were significantly and positively related to engagement, with meaningfulness the strongest. The paper's value for a psychological-safety reading lies in its account of the antecedents of the safety condition specifically: psychological safety was higher where co-worker relations were rewarding and supervisor relations supportive, and lower where employees felt bound by rigid adherence to co-worker norms or were prone to self-consciousness. Safety, in other words, was predicted by supportive relationships and undermined by conformity pressure and self-focused anxiety, an early individual-level anticipation of the relational and leadership antecedents that later work (Nembhard and Edmondson; Carmeli and Gittell, both here) would develop. Meaningfulness, for its part, was predicted by job enrichment and work-role fit. Beyond its findings, the study contributed measures of the three conditions that became widely used, making it a reference point for the measurement of safety and engagement as much as for their theory. As no open-access full text is available, this node is built from the paper's abstract and cross-checked secondary sources rather than the primary text; the reported determinants and relations are summarised at the level those sources support.

- **This page:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/may-gilson-harter-2004/
- **View the source paper:** https://doi.org/10.1348/096317904322915892
- **Interactive map:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/?mode=papers&node=may-gilson-harter-2004

## Connected concepts (10)

- [Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/kahn-1990.md) (paper)
- [Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/edmondson-1999.md) (paper)
- [Psychological Safety: A Meta-Analytic Review and Extension](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/frazier-et-al-2017.md) (paper)
- [High-Quality Relationships, Psychological Safety, and Learning from Failures in Work Organizations](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/carmeli-gittell-2009.md) (paper)
- [Personal and Organizational Change Through Group Methods: The Laboratory Approach](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/schein-bennis-1965.md) (paper)
- [Psychological Safety, Trust, and Learning in Organizations: A Group-Level Lens](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/edmondson-2004.md) (paper)
- [Benefits of PS](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/benefits-of-psychological-safety.md)
- [Individual Resilience](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/individual-resilience.md)
- [Measuring PS](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/measure-psychological-safety.md)
- [Measuring PS: Questions First](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/psychological-safety-87-measuring-psychological-safety-questions-to-ask-yourself-first.md)