New Scale Captures How Healthcare Workers Share Both the Good Times and the Bad

Hospitals run on teamwork, yet the psychological support that flows between colleagues has long been measured with tools designed for other workplaces. A team of researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Public Health, working with a clinician at Zhongshan Hospital of Fudan University, has now built and validated a dedicated instrument for the task: the Perceived Coworker Support for Healthcare Staff scale, or PCS-HS. Published in BMC Psychology, the study argues that most existing research on workplace support has concentrated on what happens when things go wrong, leaving a striking gap in our understanding of how colleagues respond when their peers experience positive events, from a successful promotion to a well-handled emergency case.

The conceptual starting point is a distinction that organizational psychologists have increasingly drawn in recent years. Social support in the workplace is not a single, undifferentiated commodity. When a nurse struggles after a patient death or a physician faces a hostile complaint, the empathy, practical help and listening offered by colleagues constitute support in bad times. But when a colleague celebrates a professional achievement, shares good news or earns recognition, the enthusiasm, congratulations and shared joy that coworkers express represent a fundamentally different form of support, one that researchers link to a process known as interpersonal capitalization, in which sharing positive events amplifies their emotional benefits. The new scale was designed to capture both sides of this coin, along with a general dimension of everyday assistance and camaraderie.

Building the instrument followed the classic sequence of scale development, but with careful attention to the realities of hospital work. The researchers first conducted a literature review and then carried out case interviews with sixteen representative healthcare staff members, using their accounts to ground the draft items in authentic workplace scenarios rather than abstract psychological constructs. From this qualitative foundation, a preliminary scale emerged with three dimensions: general support, support in bad times and support in good times. The research group then reviewed and revised the draft items iteratively, refining wording, semantic clarity and the separation between dimensions, a step intended to ensure that respondents would interpret each question as the designers intended.

The psychometric evaluation rested on an anonymous online survey distributed to employees at three Chinese hospitals in 2023. The survey package included the new 18-item scale alongside established measures of workplace well-being, most notably the Maslach Burnout Inventory in its Human Services Survey form for medical personnel and a Psychological Safety Scale, which served as criteria against which the validity of the new instrument could be judged. Demographic and professional information was also collected, allowing the researchers to check that the scale behaved sensibly across different roles and backgrounds within the hospital workforce.

Participation was substantial. Responses arrived from 878 hospital employees, and after data cleaning the researchers retained 626 participants for analysis, an attrition rate of 28.7 percent. That figure, while not unusual for online occupational surveys, matters for interpreting the results: the final sample represents those who completed the full battery of questionnaires, and the authors report the loss transparently. With the cleaned dataset in hand, the team turned to the statistical machinery of modern scale validation, including exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, reliability estimation and a series of validity checks designed to establish that the instrument measures something real, distinct and useful.

The structural findings are among the most technically interesting aspects of the study. Rather than a simple three-factor architecture, the analyses revealed a bifactor structure: one dominant general factor of perceived coworker support, onto which all eighteen items load, plus three specific factors corresponding to general support, negative event support and positive event support. Bifactor models are increasingly favored in psychological measurement because they allow researchers to quantify how much of the variance in responses reflects a broad underlying construct versus narrower, dimension-specific content. Indices such as explained common variance, the proportion of uncontaminated correlations, omega hierarchical and omega hierarchical subscale coefficients are the standard diagnostic tools here, and the authors report evidence supporting both the dominance of the general factor and the meaningfulness of the specific dimensions.

Beyond structure, the study provides evidence for criterion-related validity, meaning that scores on the PCS-HS correlate with external outcomes in the expected directions, including associations with burnout and psychological safety as measured by the established instruments. The researchers also report incremental validity, a crucial but often neglected test: the new scale predicts relevant outcomes beyond what is already captured by existing measures, such as the widely used Survey of Perceived Organizational Support. This matters because a new questionnaire earns its place in the toolkit only if it adds explanatory power, and the claim here is that coworker-level support, particularly its positive-event dimension, carries information that organizational-level support measures do not. Reliability estimates, including composite reliability and average variance extracted figures, rounded out the psychometric case.

Why does the positive-event side of the scale matter so much? The authors frame their contribution around workplace social capitalization processes, the idea that organizations can maximize staff well-being by attending to how colleagues respond to both adverse and favorable events. In high-pressure clinical environments, where burnout rates are persistently concerning and staff turnover carries direct costs for patient care, the emotional residue of daily events accumulates quickly. A colleague who shares in a peer’s success may amplify that success’s psychological benefit, while a colleague who dismisses it may quietly erode motivation. By giving researchers and hospital administrators a validated way to measure these dynamics, the PCS-HS opens the door to interventions that target not only crisis support but also the celebration and recognition behaviors that sustain morale over the long term.

The study also carries methodological significance for the field of occupational health psychology. Perceived organizational support has been a vital construct in research on workplace well-being, but it typically captures employees’ global sense of how much their employer values their contributions. Coworker support, by contrast, operates at the level of daily interpersonal exchange, and the healthcare setting imposes distinctive conditions: shift work, hierarchical clinical teams, life-and-death stakes and emotionally intense patient interactions. A scale built specifically from interviews with healthcare staff, tested in real hospitals and structured to separate support in good times from support in bad times, offers a precision that generic social support measures cannot match. The bifactor solution further means that future studies can choose to model either the broad construct or its specific facets depending on their research questions.

Caveats remain, as they do in any single-country validation study. The data come from three Chinese hospitals surveyed in 2023, and cross-cultural generalization will require replication elsewhere; the authors’ transparent reporting of the 28.7 percent attrition rate likewise invites caution about who is represented in the final sample. The article was published as an open-access paper on 28 September 2026, receiving editorial acceptance earlier that month after submission in February, and the authors declare no competing interests and no external funding. Ethics approval was obtained from the Institutional Review Board of Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, with informed consent from all participants, and the work was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. For a healthcare sector still reckoning with post-pandemic burnout and workforce shortages, the message of the study is quietly radical: well-being at work depends not only on how colleagues catch you when you fall, but on how genuinely they cheer when you rise.

Subject of Research: Development and validation of a perceived coworker support scale for healthcare staff

Article Title: Sharing weal and woe: the perceived coworker support scale for healthcare staff

Article References: Chen, Z., Bai, M., Xian, Y., Zhang, Z., & Li, S. (2026). Sharing weal and woe: the perceived coworker support scale for healthcare staff. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05591-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05591-2

Keywords: coworker support, healthcare staff, scale development, psychometrics, bifactor model, workplace well-being, burnout, psychological safety, interpersonal capitalization, organizational support, occupational health psychology, hospitals