Leading to Occupational Health and Safety

How Leadership Behaviours Impact Organizational Safety and Well-Being

E. Kevin Kelloway, Karina Nielsen, Jennifer K. Dimoff, E. Kevin Kelloway, Karina Nielsen, Jennifer K. Dimoff

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781118973714
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Industrial & Organizational Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Leading to Occupational Health and Safety brings together prominent researchers to explore the pervasive roles that leaders play indetermining the health, safety and mental well-being ofemployees in organizations.

• The first text to directly link organizational leadership behaviours with health and safety outcomes, covering theory, research and evidence-based best practice
• Argues that a leader's impact can be far more far-reaching than is commonly realized, and examines the effects of leadership on safety, physical wellness and wellbeing, and psychological wellbeing
• Explores the theoretical underpinnings of effective leadership styles and behaviors, and advances both research and practice in order to encourage better leadership and healthier, safer organizations
• Features contributions from internationally known and respected researchers including Sharon Clarke, Kara Arnold, Fred Luthans, Ståle Einarsen, Julian Barling, and Emma Donaldson-Feilder

1
Leadership and Safety: A Self‐Regulation and Social Learning Perspective

Sharon Clarke, Sara Guediri and Allan Lee

Leadership has long been established as a critical element in relation to workplace safety. We will consider the role of leadership in safety, with a focus on recent theoretical and practical developments in the area. Our chapter is organized into three parts that cover: (1) established, existing research on the role of leadership for safety; (2) emerging strands of research that approach safety leadership from a self‐regulation and social learning perspective; (3) implications for safety leadership interventions. The chapter reviews established research as well as new thinking about leadership and safety to help drive novel research directions in the area of safety leadership.

Safety Leadership: The Current State of Knowledge

In this initial section, we discuss the current state of knowledge regarding safety leadership, in particular traditional leadership theories, such as Bass’s (1985) full‐range leadership theory (including transformational and transactional leadership) and the implications for workplace safety. We consider the importance of leadership in relation to the organization’s safety culture and as an antecedent to safety climate, before turning our attention to the underlying psychological mechanisms linking leadership to safety outcomes.

Within organizations, leadership at the most senior levels has direct effects on organizational safety: senior management decisions (for example regarding resource allocation, investment in training, maintenance and updating of equipment) will determine how safety risks are managed at an operational level. Such decisions are fundamentally shaped by (and consequently shape) the organization’s safety culture. The failure of leaders to adequately factor safety considerations into their business decisions has been repeatedly highlighted by investigations into major disasters, where the adverse effects of poor safety leadership can be measured in terms of their considerable human, societal and environmental costs. Reason (1993, 1997) argued that the majority of organizational accidents have their origins within the managerial sphere; but the deleterious effects of poor safety leadership permeate throughout the organization, affecting attitudes and behaviours at every level. For example, in 2010 a major accident at BP’s Macondo offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico resulted in the deaths of 11 oil workers, and, subsequently, in an extensive oil spill with devastating and wide‐ranging environmental effects. The National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling (2011) report into the accident concluded that: ‘most of the mistakes and oversights at Macondo can be traced back to a single overarching failure – a failure of management. Better management by BP, Halliburton, and Transocean would almost certainly have prevented the blowout by improving the ability of individuals involved to identify the risks they faced, and to properly evaluate, communicate, and address them’ (p. 90). This conclusion is not unusual, and highlights the critical role that leaders play in setting the context within which individuals evaluate and manage risks on a day‐to‐day basis. Similar conclusions have been drawn from the analysis of earlier incidents in the oil and gas industry, such as the Texas City oil refinery explosion in 2005 (Hopkins, 2008), and the Piper Alpha disaster in 1988 (Cullen, 1990), and across various other industrial sectors.

As suggested by the above quote, failures of management affect the cognitions, perceptions and behaviours of individuals working at an operational level. Leaders may directly influence the level of hazards within working environments, but they may also affect risk evaluations and safety attitudes through employees’ perceptions of the safety climate (i.e., perceptions of the priority that safety is given in relation to other organizational goals, such as productivity; Zohar, 1980, 2010). Leaders’ actions and attitudes towards safety, which reflect the strength of their commitment to safety, are recognized as a key aspect of safety climate (Flin, Mearns, O'Connor & Bryden, 2000). Substantial research has investigated the role of safety climate and established that safety climate acts as an antecedent of a range of safety outcomes (such as injuries and accidents) and safety‐related behaviours (such as safety compliance and safety participation). This body of work comprises both meta‐analyses (e.g., Beus, Payne, Bergman & Arthur, 2010; Christian, Bradley, Wallace & Burke, 2009; Clarke, 2006, 2010; Nahrgang, Morgeson & Hofmann, 2011) and longitudinal studies (e.g., Johnson, 2007; Neal & Griffin, 2006; Zohar, 2000).

Safety leadership acts as an antecedent of safety climate, which in turn mediates the effects on safety outcomes (Clarke, 2013; Mullen & Kelloway, 2009; Zohar, 2002a), as well as having direct effects on behaviour (Clarke, 2010). Zohar (2002a) argued that the value‐based and individualized interactions characteristic of transformational leadership underpin the positive impact of this leadership style on safety outcomes. Indeed, there is a well‐established link between leaders who demonstrate genuine care for the well‐being and safety of their workforce, and higher levels of workplace safety (Cohen, 1977; Dunbar, 1975; Hofmann, Jacobs & Landy, 1995; Mullen, 2005; Parker, Axtell & Turner, 2001). In a longitudinal study, Parker et al. (2001) demonstrated that having supportive, coaching‐oriented supervisors led to safer working over an 18‐month period. Furthermore, supportive leadership had a significant positive association with safety compliance, and also with employee engagement and satisfaction, as shown by the meta‐analysis conducted by Nahrgang and colleagues (2011). Such relationships would suggest that supportive leaders encourage employees to follow safety rules and regulations, but also that they create a positive working environment, which enhances work‐related attitudes, such as job satisfaction. Supportive leaders are more willing to listen to safety concerns and discuss safety issues with their team (Hofmann & Morgeson, 1999; Mullen, 2005). Such safety interactions not only will encourage further safety participation from employees, but should also raise managerial awareness of safety issues, leading to reduced hazards in the workplace. Evidence gathered from interventions involving enhanced interactions between supervisors and employees around safety supports a positive impact on employees’ behaviour and safety outcomes (Kines, Andersen, Spangenberg, Mikkelsen, Dyreborg & Zohar, 2010; Zohar, 2002b; Zohar & Polachek, 2014).

Discussion concerning the most effective leadership style for promoting workplace safety has centred on the positive influence of transformational leadership on employees’ safety perceptions, attitudes and behaviour (Barling, Loughlin & Kelloway, 2002; Conchie & Donald, 2009; Inness, Turner, Barling & Stride, 2010; Kelloway, Mullen & Francis, 2006; Zohar & Luria, 2004), and its association with fewer accidents and injuries (Yule, 2002; Zohar, 2002b). One mechanism through which transformational leaders influence their employees is based on the types of relationship that form between leaders and their subordinates over time. Transformational leaders are better able to build with their employees high leader–member exchange (LMX) relationships, which are based on trust, loyalty and integrity (Dulebohn, Bommer, Liden, Brouer & Ferris, 2012). Leader behaviours in these high‐quality relationships are reciprocated by employees through safe working and safety citizenship behaviours (Hofmann, Morgeson & Gerras, 2003; Kath, Marks & Ranney, 2010). Because of the trust‐based relationship with supervisors, high LMX has been associated with employees feeling comfortable speaking up and raising safety concerns in the workplace (Kath et al., 2010). However, while Hofmann et al. (2003) showed a strong positive association between high LMX and safety citizenship role definitions, suggesting that employees reciprocated high LMX through performing such behaviours, they also found that this relationship was moderated by safety climate. Thus, this relationship was strong in work groups with a positive safety climate, but much weaker in those exhibiting poorer safety climates. As high LMX relationships only lead to increased engagement in safety citizenship behaviours when safety climate is positive, this would suggest that safety‐related behaviour is only viewed as a legitimate means of reciprocating a high LMX relationship with the leader when safety is perceived as having high priority. Similarly, Clark, Zickar and Jex (2014) showed that narrowly defined role definitions (i.e., those characterized by the belief that organizational citizenship behaviours (OCBs) are dependent on the quality of social exchange) moderated the positive relationship between safety climate and nurses’ safety citizenship behaviours.

Transformational leaders, through a better understanding of safety issues and improved communications (Conchie, Taylor & Donald, 2012), may directly influence decisions about the management of safety hazards. In addition, there will be indirect influence through their capacity to build consensus amongst employees about the priority given to safety (Luria, 2008; Zohar & Tenne‐Gazit, 2008). At a group level, Zohar and Tenne‐Gazit (2008) found that transformational leaders encouraged team members to develop shared perceptions of safety through the promotion of shared values, the setting of collective goals, and teamwork. The study, which focused on group interactions within military platoons, using social network analysis, demonstrated that communication density (extent of platoon members’ interactions) mediated the effect of transformational platoon leaders on the subsequent development of group safety climate. In contrast, it has been argued that passive leaders, who demonstrate no interest in safety and avoid safety problems, disrupt the formation of shared views regarding the importance of safety (Luria, 2008). Supporting research has shown that passive leadership results in significant negative effects on safety, including increased incidence of occupational injuries and adverse safety events (Kelloway et al., 2006; Mullen, Kelloway & Teed, 2011) and reduced safety‐related behaviours, especially safety participation (Jiang & Probst, 2016; Smith, Eldridge & DeJoy, 2016). Furthermore, even transformational leaders who sometimes engage in passive safety leader behaviours risk damaging workplace safety: this inconsistent leadership style has been associated with negative safety outcomes. Mullen et al. (2011) found that, for those leaders who demonstrated both transformational and passive styles, the use of passive behaviours (e.g., avoiding safety issues) attenuated the...