Affiliation:
1. University of Georgia USA
2. Deakin University Australia
3. Future of Work Institute Curtin University Australia
4. School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences and Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health Peking University China
Abstract
SummaryPrevious research on the motivational factors of safety performance has predominantly focused on one's willingness to directly enact safety behaviors or safety‐specific motivation. The current study extends beyond this view and examines an additional motivational force, altruistic motivation, as a main predictor of employees' safety performance at both individual and team levels. Further, we provide that servant leadership serves as a critical precursor of employee altruistic motivation. A sample of 416 nurses in 42 workgroups and their respective supervisors from a hospital in China completed a two‐wave survey. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to analyze the data. The results indicated that altruistic motivation was positively related to safety performance at both individual and team levels, with a stronger effect at the team level, supporting a proportional theory of homology. Multilevel mediation results showed that servant leadership was positively related to altruistic motivation, which in turn positively led to safety performance at both individual and team levels. These findings highlight both the theoretical and practical importance of encouraging altruistic motivation to improve workplace safety.
Funder
National Natural Science Foundation of China
Subject
Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management,General Psychology,Sociology and Political Science,Applied Psychology