Abstract
The safety climate in an organization is determined by how managers balance the relative importance of safety and productivity. This gives leaders a central role in safety in an organization, and from this follows that leadership training may improve safety. Transformational leadership may be one important component but may need to be combined with positive control leadership behaviors. Leadership training that combines transformational leadership and applied behavior analysis may be a way to achieve this.
Purpose: The study evaluates changes in safety climate and productivity among employees whose leaders (n = 76) took part in a leadership training program combining transformational leadership and applied behavior analysis. Changes in managers’ ratings of transformational leadership, contingent rewards, Management-by-Exceptions Active (MBEA) and safety self-efficacy were evaluated. Moreover, we compare whether the training has differentiated effects on safety depending on managers’ specific focus on improvements in: (1) safety, (2) productivity or (3) general leadership.
Result: Safety climate improved over time, while self-rated productivity remained unchanged. As
hypothesized, transformational leadership, contingent rewards and safety self-efficacy as proxies for positive control behaviors increased while MBEA, a negative control behavior, decreased. Managers focusing on general leadership skills showed greater improvement in safety climate expectations.
Conclusions: Training leaders in both transformational leadership and applied behavior analysis is related to improvements in leadership and safety. There is no added benefit of focusing specifically on safety or productivity.
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Other findings from the full-text paper:
1. It was found that the perceived priority of safety could be increased without negatively affecting employee ratings of productivity.
2. This finding may be related to leaders being better able to manage multiple demands to avoid unintended consequences on performance.
3. Perhaps an advantage of more general training is that it permits leaders to practice handling multiple objectives. The authors suggest that another advantage of general leadership training is that it may allow leaders who have little interest in safety training to still significantly and positively impact safety.
Supporting point 3, other research suggests that a focus on low-fidelity simulations (ones that do not have high photorealism of the environment and task) and more generalised skill training can also improve learning by developing their ability to deal with uncertain situations and thus develop problem-solving skills which can be applied to more situations (e.g. resilient skills).
Also, there seems to be a fragmentation of several organisational concepts in safety (e.g. ‘safety culture’ over organisational culture, ‘safety leadership’ over general leadership). These findings I believe, alongside research on emergent and complex adaptive systems and the criticisms of ‘safety culture’, lend further support to the notion of considering how the entire organisation, its people, subcultures, systems and technology interact and make sense of risk as an emergent property instead of deconstructing into parts.
Authors: Ulricavon Thiele Schwarz, Henna Hasson, Susanne Tafvelin, 2016, Safety Science
Study link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2015.07.020
Link to the LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/leadership-training-occupational-health-intervention-ben-hutchinson
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