Elsevier

Safety Science

Volume 121, January 2020, Pages 485-495
Safety Science

Trickling down: The impact of leaders on individual role clarity through safety climate strength across time

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2019.09.009Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Leader passive management by exception negatively predicts safety climate strength.

  • Low safety climate strength increases employee' conscientiousness-role clarity link.

  • Strong relationship across time for both safety climate and safety climate strength.

  • Leader support fails to predict safety climate or safety climate strength.

Abstract

Safety researchers and practitioners seeking to have a long lasting impact on important variables such as safety climate typically investigate constructs operating within the immediate organisational environment such as leader support. These frequently have an impact on individual level perceptions. This paper contributes to theoretical development in this area by examining the impact of positive forms of leader support and negative forms such as passive management by exception on safety climate and safety climate strength (i.e. consistency in safety climate perceptions within a group). Results provide strong evidence for the negative influence of passive management by exception on safety climate strength across time and concur and support previous research demonstrating significant positive relationships between safety climate perceptions across time. Importantly, the impact of passive management by exception on safety climate strength flowed through to a cross-level moderation of the relationship between individual conscientiousness and role clarity suggesting that both leaders and safety climate strength fundamentally change individual behaviour. The results suggest an important potential for intervention work specifically correcting leadership styles which are passive to instead encourage proactivity in order to improve group safety climate strength and individual role clarity. In addition, the results indicate that safety climate constructs are highly related across time and efforts to change perceptions may lie earlier in the nomological network.

Introduction

Leaders have an important role to play in establishing the strategic outlook of a company. This frequently involves introducing and maintaining accepted behaviours, norms and attitudes which directly influence a team or organisation’s climate. Within a safety critical context, this is crucial for introducing behavioural norms that prioritise the fundamental personal safety of employees. For this reason the safety research domain frequently focusses on the role of leadership behaviours in influencing employee safety climate perceptions (Barling et al., 2002, Kelloway et al., 2006, Zohar, 2002a, Zohar, 2002b). Commentators converge on the important role of safety leaders in communicating effectively with subordinates and ensuring a standardised flow of information through the various hierarchies of an organisation. However the theory is lacking and under-developed in its consideration of how these types of behaviours impact on the consistency of safety climate perceptions within groups (i.e. the safety climate strength). This is particularly relevant for understanding what type of leadership acts as a force of stability and reliability in imparting a consistent view and interpretation of safety within an organisation by the employees, and by extension, a consistent and safe pattern of behaviours from employees.

Going forward, leader support will be used to refer to specific supportive behaviours displayed by supervisors or leaders. Support include elements of emotional (i.e. caring for others), instrumental (i.e. help with work tasks) and structural support (i.e. existence of support networks) (Bowling et al., 2004). Accordingly, those behaviours relevant to perceptions of the leader include elements of both transformational and transactional styles which typically emphasise divergent emotional and instrumental qualities. For example, transformational leadership refers to the degree to which leaders are able to instill purpose and drive in employees through a focus on their intrinsic needs and the longer term goals of their group or organisation (Judge and Piccolo, 2004). Transactional leadership instead is the exchange of resources between employee and leader towards an explicit or implicitly agreed upon goal, with a focus by the leader on correcting divergences in expected behaviour (Judge and Piccolo, 2004).

The substantive application of this paper then is in examining how leader support affects group safety climate and variability in group safety climate (i.e. safety climate strength) across time, and how safety climate strength is then able to moderate and shape individual job perceptions in a safety critical context. Determining whether leader support is able to influence variability in perceptions over time is crucial for those organisations working in safety critical industries which aim to reduce such variability, and ensure that key messages regarding their safety functioning and expectations of safety behaviour are clearly communicated and consistently understood across the various levels of an organisation. In the remainder of the introduction we discuss the key dependent variable of interest, safety climate, before introducing the effect of leader support within an organisation on safety climate and safety climate strength. Additionally we introduce the importance of situational context variables such as safety climate strength in shaping the relationship between individual employee characteristics and their perceptions of their job, which is a relationship crucial in shaping employee safety behaviour and a core question examined in the paper.

Section snippets

Safety climate

Safety climate has received substantial attention within management and organisational psychology literatures since its introduction several decades ago (Zohar, 1980, Casey et al., 2017). Climate refers to the individual, or aggregated group, perceptions held by individuals about their work environment: in safety contexts it typically focusses on whether employees believe their organisation places enough emphasis on safety and the value placed on behaving safely (Zohar, 1980). Safety climate

Leadership and safety

Leaders are often seen as central players in the formation of localised climates within different levels of an organisation by acting as “interpretive filters” of work related events (Kozlowski and Doherty, 1989). Thus as with the wider management discipline, safety research has focused on the impact of leader leadership styles such as transformational and transactional leadership (Barling et al., 2002, Clarke, 2013, Conchie, 2013, Conchie and Donald, 2009, Conchie et al., 2012, Inness et al.,

Climate strength

Climate strength is a quantitative construct based on the degree of variation or agreement found within samples reporting on their perceptions of a given workgroup or organization’s climate (Chan, 1998, González-Romá et al., 2002, Schneider et al., 2002). The study of climate strength is a methodological counter to the tendency within climate studies to focus entirely on the aggregated group or organisational climate in relation to outcome variables of interest, that is, using the mean of

Sample and procedure

Employees at a state government department in Australia tasked with construction of main road networks and infrastructure completed two surveys investigating aspects of work effectiveness including questions about perceptions of safety climate at the group level. The surveys were distributed a year apart from each other, and teams were matched based on reported work unit numbers allocated at T1. Prior to aggregation, the sample included a diverse range of respondents with respect to age (T1

Results

The results of the present paper focused on responses to questions regarding the leadership behaviours exhibited by leaders at the work unit level and also conscientiousness and role clarity at the individual level. Given the tendency for research to conceptually distinguish between transformational and transactional type behaviours, preliminary analysis of the T1 leadership data prior to aggregation used exploratory factor analysis to justify combination of the items into a single construct.

Discussion

The present paper provided some preliminary support for the positive impact of leader support and negative impact of passive management by exception on group safety climate perceptions across time, however this was non-significant once initial safety climate was controlled for. Thus we did not find support for Hypothesis 1. Although leader support was again a non-significant predictor of safety climate strength once initial safety climate strength was controlled for, conversely the negative

Research impact

Safety and leader support. These results initially provided support for the wider body of literature emphasising the lasting positive impact of leader support behaviours which combine qualities of both transformational and transactional leadership styles in the form of overall ‘good’ leadership, and conversely the negative impact of passive leadership styles. Specific transformational behaviours included vision, intellectual stimulation, inspirational communication and supportive leadership.

Future directions and limitations

Future research should further explore how changes in leadership personnel affect safety climate investigations, which is something we were unfortunately unable to do in the present paper. For example, it may have been the case that employees in the present sample retained the same leaders across the space of a year, and thus the leadership styles evident at T1 were largely the same at T2. However if you have one leader at T1 who is passive, the effect may linger and mean that you are less able

Acknowledgements

This research was partially completed whilst the first author was a PhD candidate at the School of Psychology, University of Western Australia. It was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship and Rio Tinto Centre for Safety Top-Up Scholarship awarded to the first author. The sponsors did not have involvement in the planning, development or preparation of this article for publication. Data used has some overlap with another publication (Rafferty &

Declaration of Competing Interest

None.

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