Speaking Up about Workplace Safety: An Experimental Study on Safety Leadership

Abstract

In this study, we test whether different types of safety leadership styles predict different employees’ change-oriented discretionary communications about safety (i.e., safety voice) after controlling for proactive personality disposition to improve organizational sustainability. Building upon a multidimensional model of safety voice, which attempts to conceptualize different ways in which employees make suggestions about safety procedures, we developed four realistic scenarios in which we manipulated the supervisor’s safety leadership style, including: (1) transformational safety leadership, (2) transactional safety leadership, (3) passive safety leadership, and (4) control group (i.e., no leadership at all). We randomly assigned 103 participants to two of four scenarios and measured four facets of safety voice and proactive personality dispositions. The findings showed that after controlling for the respondents’ proactive personality, transformative safety leadership predicted promotive safety voice, transactional safety leadership predicted preventive safety voice, and passive safety leadership predicted hostile safety voice. These findings have a number of implications for our understanding of safety leadership and employees’ safety communications.