This explored how different types of safety leadership styles predicted different employee communications about safety, called safety voice.
The leadership styles were:
- transformational safety leadership: leader showing consideration for employees’ personal & professional growth, listening to concerns and needs, influences followers’ behaviour via idealised influencing and role modelling.
- transactional safety leadership: leaders clarify expectations and rewards and monitors employee behaviour, taking corrective action when needed (but prior to adverse events)
- passive safety leadership: leaders who either take action only after an event or problem surfaces or lack leadership capacity completely (laissez-fare)
- No leadership style (control group)
Safety voice is defined as behaviours that seek to “improve safety by identifying current limitations and possibilities for positive change” (p2). Four facets of safety voice were identified:
- Promotive safety voice: voluntary communicative act aiming to functionally improve safety processes by changing what is currently being done and moving the company towards incremental improvement
- Preventative safety voice: voluntary communicative act aiming at expressing personal concerns related to contextual and environmental factors of work rather than related to human agency
- Prohibitive safety voice: Voluntary communicative act aimed at reporting safety concerns that arise from intentional human behaviours. It’s said this often overlaps with whistleblowing.
- Hostile safety voice: Voluntary expression of derogatory and hurtful comments regarding safety processes or safety management. The authors state “This may entail some form of conflict with the organization or within the work unit, as research has shown that employees may actively resist, ignore, or reframe safety messages” (p3).
It’s said that research on voice behaviours indicates that having employees openly discuss workplace issues protects the organisation against negative aspects of resentment and anger, improves org agility, prevents knowledge loss and promotes customer acquisition (p3).
For the methodology, the authors developed four realistic scenarios (vignettes), which manipulated the vignettes supervisor’s safety leadership style. 103 blue collar workers from 10 small-medium Italian companies were involved.
Results:
After controlling for employees’ proactive personalities, found was different leadership styles had differing impacts on employee safety voice. Participants in transformational safety leadership condition showed significantly greater levels of promotive safety voice compared to transactional, passive and no leadership groups.
Accordingly, the authors argue “These findings are in line with the broader safety literature, which suggests that transformational leadership leads to better safety outcomes” (p13).
In leaders influencing employees, it’s said that the process goes beyond the personal characteristics and dispositions of the followers and may be more strongly facilitated by contextual and organisational factors.
Participants in the transactional safety leadership condition showed significantly greater levels of preventive safety voice, compared to participants in the other groups. That is, “the leaders’ attentiveness to negative outcomes (i.e., errors and deviations from safety norms) and preference for stability (i.e., not changing/improving the safety system if things work just fine) will lead to preventive safety voice behaviors” (p13). The authors said that leaders who take a conservative approach influence employees who then take a preventative approach (defending the current safety system). I’m not really sure if this is meant to be a positive or a negative thing (or both, or neither…).
Safety leadership styles weren’t significantly related to prohibitive safety voice – although they note that there are theoretical and empirical reasons “to believe that both transformational and transactional leadership styles may affect whistleblowing attitudes” (p13).
Finally, participants in the passive safety leadership group showed significantly higher levels of hostile safety voice compared to the other groups. Interestingly, they highlight that passive leadership “is most likely not a state of zero-leadership, rather it is the nonfulfillment of legitimate expectations. Consequently, passive leaders, through their ignorance or absence, are associated with high group conflict levels relationship” (p13).
That is, passive or laissez-fare leadership styles don’t necessarily result in passive or neutral outcomes but rather can facilitate higher group-related hostility. It’s noted that hostile safety voice “may be interpreted as a sign of a clear conflict between employees that are voicing their dissatisfaction with safety management and their leader, or management” (p14).
For practical significance of the findings, they discuss things like training and recruitment. For training and mentoring, the findings lend support to upskill leaders in specific facets of leadership rather than only general interventions or just transformational leadership.
Fostering and listening to employee safety voice is also said to be critical. Furthermore, instead of focusing on feedback from the most proactive of employees, consideration should be given, presumably, to the lesser proactive but also “to other organizational factors that may foster communication, such as a leader’s behavior, organizational justice, and trust” (p15).
As noted earlier, contextual and organisational factors may be just as powerful if not more than individual personality dispositions in safety voice and thus, more focus in recruiting and organisational interventions towards leadership and organisational capabilities may be warranted.
Authors: Andrea Bazzoli, Matteo Curcuruto, James I. Morgan, Margherita Brondino, Margherita Pasini, 2020, Sustainability
Study link: https://doi.org/10.3390/su12187458
Link to the LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/speaking-up-workplace-safety-experimental-study-ben-hutchinson
SafetyInsights.org 