We often put leadership on a pedestal – the silver bullet for all organisational ills.
But what does the evidence suggest? What influence does various aspects of leadership have on various organisational safety measures?
This episode explores the research behind leadership, before we move into a couple of more critical leadership studies next week.
Today’s pod covers: Lyubykh, Z., Turner, N., Hershcovis, M. S., & Deng, C. (2022). A meta-analysis of leadership and workplace safety: Examining relative importance, contextual contingencies, and methodological moderators. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(12), 2149.
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Transcript:
We often put leaders on a pedestal, seeing their efforts as a magic bullet for every organisational challenge, especially when it comes to workplace safety. But what if that romanticised vision isn’t telling the whole story? What happens when we look at the evidence?
Hello everyone, I’m Ben Hutchinson and this is Safe As, a podcast dedicated to the thrifty analysis of safety, risk and performance research. Visit safetyinsides.org for more research. Today’s study is a comprehensive meta-analysis by Lyubykh et al 2022 in Journal of Applied Psychology. The research has conducted a merit analysis, which is a method that combines results from multiple studies for more robust conclusions. They synthesise data from 194 samples, collectively involving over 104,000 participants. Their work examined the links between five broad categories of leadership behaviours, change-oriented, relational-oriented, task-oriented, passive and destructive, and then seven different workplace safety variables.
So as a preamble, there’s a lot of research on leadership, often not so critical. So I present this research today as an example of some of the more positive facets of leadership, and to keep things interesting, I’ll cover a couple of critical studies of leadership in the future pods, ones that even challenge the stable construct of leadership. So a quick definition of what these leadership styles are, so change-oriented leadership, it’s focused on initiating change, emphasising long-term vision, improvements and innovation. This includes transformational leadership.
Relational leadership, it aims at building and improving relationships, showing concerns for followers’ well-being. Task-oriented leadership, breakers are on achieving specific organisation outcomes, like clear instructions, defining roles, monitoring performance, passive leadership, characterised by an absence of objectives or inaction, with leaders only engaging when a problem can no longer be ignored. And destructive leadership, describes behaviours aimed at harming followers or the organisation, through hostile actions, intimidation, rudeness. The safety variables examined in the study range from tangible safety outcomes, like incident data, also to safety performance measures like compliance, participation or other elements like safety knowledge, motivation, climate, attitudes. They also look at other things and other contextual factors like national culture, and things like that.
So what did they find? While the meta-analysis confirms that overall, leadership behaviours are actually associated with proxies of workplace safety. So, constructive leadership behaviours, those focused on change, relationships and tasks, were generally found to be positively related to various aspects of workplace safety, again as very narrowly defined by their measures of safety. Conversely, negative leadership behaviours, such as passive and destructive styles, were largely associated with lower levels of workplace safety, not too surprising. The study did provide some nuances around the importance and strengths of leadership categories, so task-oriented leadership consistently emerged as a significant contributor to workplace safety.
It explained the largest amount of variance in the constructs, like safety climate, motivation, appliance and participation. This means leaders who provide clear instructions, defined roles, and monitored adherence to processes tend to have a stronger positive impact. Relational-oriented leadership also proved to be highly important. It was often the second most influential category and notably contributed most to safety attitudes and safety knowledge, though based on fewer studies, form those conclusions. This type of leadership, focusing on building quality relationships and showing concern for followers, was particularly influential for personal safety orientations.
Relage-oriented leadership, including transformational leadership, despite being frequently studied, did not emerge as a single largest contributor for any of the seven safety variables examined. While it still showed positive associations with many safety variables, like climate and appliance, its relative importance for safety was found to be less prominent in bad to task-orientated and relational approaches. Passive leadership, characterized by an action, had a sizable negative influence across several safety constructs, and then destructive leadership, as expected, showed negative associations, so for instance, with safety climate attitudes and safety outcomes.
However, the number of samples for destructive leadership was relatively small. So some core messages or conclusions come out of this, so it suggests that when it does come to workplace safety, it’s not just about having leaders, it’s which kind of leader in how they act, how they role model. The data points to leaders who are clear about tasks and processes, who genuinely care about their employees.
These are particularly effective in fostering a safe work environment. While inspiring a shared vision is valuable, the day-to-day, hands-on management and interpersonal support seem to be more directly impactful for safety measures, probably not too surprising. And equally important, leaders who are disengaged or actively harmful can significantly undermine safety efforts.
Some other contextual factors. Well, they found that leadership effectiveness isn’t universal, it does depend on the context, so in high-risk industries, task-oriented leadership becomes even more critical. Employees in such settings expect clear directions, clear role modeling, and have less tolerance for ambiguity or passive leadership. National culture, especially power distance, also plays a role. Young cultures with lower power distance, egalitarian and relationship-focused leaders may be more effective, while higher power distance cultures may seem greater effectiveness from task-oriented leaders who provide clear directives. For younger workers, change-oriented leadership had stronger positive associations with safety climate or compliance and outcomes compared to older workers.
Aligning with theories that younger individuals may be more receptive to growth-oriented leadership. Lastly, safety-specific leadership, where leaders focus their behaviors explicitly on safety issues, generally had stronger associations, and safety variables compared to generalized leadership. This is a really important finding. Some people are very critical around this concept of safety leadership or safety vision or adding safety onto things. But we actually have a lot of research that shows domain specificity is often a real thing. And domain specificity often does result in additional benefits over generalized concepts. So safety leadership can actually have additional benefits over just generalized leadership. And this applies to other constructs in safety.
So what do we make of the findings? Invest wisely in leadership development, probably, prioritize developing leaders in task-orientated and particularly relational interpersonal behaviors. Consider a blended approach. So leaders with different sorts of backgrounds, capabilities, having cognitive diversity in other forms of diversity, understand in context, leaders should tailor their approach based on the factors like the industry, the risk, national culture, employee age. Absolutely address negative leadership behaviors. This underscores the damaging effects of passive and destructive leadership that have to be actively managed and focus on safety specific communication, domain specificity.
When leaders explicitly focus their communication and actions on safety, it tends to have a more potent effect. So a range of limitations, as you’d expect, I won’t go through all of them, but there was a relatively limited basis for some of the leadership styles around the research. A lot of the studies were cross-sectional, so it’s really hard to form direct cause-effect relationships. And something I found interesting, the analysis assumed a linear relationship, but some research suggests it might be curvy linear.
So for instance, a curvy linear relationship means that when it comes to leadership and safety, more isn’t always better. There might be an optimal level for certain leadership behaviors. And pushing too far beyond that point could actually become less effective or even detrimental to safety.
And another key limitation with this sort of leadership research is that it’s so myopically focused on leaders, not the followers. There’s this whole concept called followership that’s often emitted from this research. Maybe I’ll cover that another day. Finally, there’s evidence for publication bias, common method variance and more.
SafetyInsights.org 