Managing employee emotional stress is one of the most significant global challenges in the manufacturing sector today, and it is anticipated to exacerbate the trend in the coming years. For example, employee work-related stress is responsible for 12 billion lost workdays and a cost of over US$1 trillion to the worldwide economy annually, while businesses in Australia lose over $11 billion a year as a result of inadequately attending to the needs of mental health issues of employees. Employee emotional stress occurs when there are discrepancies between the physiological demands of a workplace and the inability of employees to manage the work demands.

There is a need for fresh viewpoints in light of recent scholarly discussions on employee emotional well-being, particularly the psychosocial safety climate, due to its features connected with employee emotional stress.  The commitment of management and their support for employee psychological health to mitigate work-related stress is referred to as the psychosocial safety climate. It represents organisational policies, practices, and procedures for protecting workers' psychological health and safety.

Employees who feel about organisations’ prioritizing their emotional well-being may engage in OCB. In that sense, this study examines how the psychosocial safety climate reacts to flourishing employees’ citizenship behaviour.

The proposed research will be quantitative in methodology and employ a cross-sectional survey method.  The data will be collected from the operational-level workers in manufacturing firms in Sri Lanka and will be subjected to analyses using the structural equation model (SEM).  This study will advance knowledge of this important topic by eliciting in-depth insights into the relationship between different aspects of psychosocial safety climate and organisational citizenship behaviour of employees, optimizing lean manufacturing environment, and upholding robust occupational health and safety practices. It will also present recommendations to create the appropriate conditions for establishing and sustaining a psychosocial safety climate among manufacturing firms to mitigate employee emotional stress levels. In return, it might help relevant firms to improve employee citizenship behaviour and overall business performance. This transformation involves shaping workplaces that seamlessly integrate efficiency and empathy, propelling toward a future where manufacturing synchronizes with the cadence of human resilience.

Keywords: Emotional stress, Psychosocial safety climate, OCB, Manufacturing