Psychological safety as a cross-level mechanism linking trauma-informed leadership and employee well-being in post-conflict settings

Post-conflict public institutions operate under sustained psychological strain, where leadership practices focused on compliance and control often struggle to address employees’ accumulated emotional stress. Grounded in Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, which conceptualises stress as chronic resource loss, this study examines how trauma-informed leadership (TIL) is associated with employee wellbeing in post-conflict Nigerian polytechnics through psychological safety, and how organisational culture conditions these relationships. Using a cross-sectional multilevel design, data were collected from 1,131 employees nested within nine public polytechnics in Northeast Nigeria. Multilevel structural equation modelling was employed, with robustness checks across estimation approaches to assess the stability of findings. Results indicate that TIL is positively associated with psychological safety and employee well-being, both directly and indirectly. Psychological safety functions as a theoretically grounded pathway linking leadership practices to well-being. These associations are stronger in supportive organisational cultures characterised by trust, openness, and non-punitive norms, reflecting a cross-level conditional indirect pattern. The findings highlight the joint importance of leadership practices and organisational culture for sustaining employee well-being in fragile public institutions. This study provides rare multilevel empirical evidence from a post-conflict African public-sector context and extends COR theory by clarifying how leadership and culture jointly relate to the stabilisation of employees’ psychological resources under conditions of extreme institutional strain.