On this episode of Safety of Work, we discuss how safety leadership behaviors influence workers’ motivation for safe practices.
We had trouble finding a suitable paper for this topic. Measuring and studying safety leadership often proves difficult. However, we use the paper Examining Attitudes, Norms, and Control Toward Safety Behaviors as Mediators in the Leadership-Safety Motivation Relationship.
As an aside, we offer a big “thank you” to those who shared our podcast with others. Our followers and listenership has grown considerably and we greatly appreciate it!
Topics:
Quotes:
“They were lamenting in their systematic review that lots of attempts to intervene in behavior change weren’t based on theories.”
“So, what they’re really saying is, ‘ok, we know these might be different types of behaviors, but is it sufficient to lump them all together?’ And statistically, yes it is.”
“When we say that something ‘mediates’, we’re basically saying it’s like a multiplier in the middle.”
Resources:
Drew: You're listening to the Safety of Work podcast episode 42. Today, we're asking the question, how does safety leadership behaviors influence worker motivation for safety? Let's get started. Hey, everybody, my name is Drew Rae. I'm here with David Provan, and we're from the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University. David, what's today's question?
David: Drew, today's question is related to safety leadership behaviors and worker safety motivation. But first of all, we want to send a big thank you to everyone who shared the Safety of Work podcast with a friend or colleague.
We've now got more than a thousand followers on the Safety of Work LinkedIn page, and that really is a great place to engage with us and to share your thoughts about each episode with other listeners. And we're always looking for ideas for episodes that will address the questions in our listeners’ minds and try to help with the practical challenges that you will face in your roles every day.
About five or six weeks ago now, we put up a poll asking which role in the organization you, our listeners, would like to hear more about in relation to safety? Did you want to hear about leadership? About the safety profession? About the workers? We had about 150 votes, and 50% chose leadership. This week is the first week of a two-week special on safety leadership where we're going to dive into two separate questions.
Drew, before we go further into the paper for today, do you have any general comments or thoughts in relation to safety leadership more broadly?
Drew: Yeah, we had a bit of trouble finding a good paper that we could use for this episode, and one of the challenges is that safety leadership is just a really difficult thing to work with as researchers. Everyone's interested in leadership, but actually measuring it and studying it is hard.
It's hard to define the first one. There's actually an open question where the safety leadership even exists, whether there's this thing about leading safety that's different from any other type of leadership, or is safety just a topic that leaders care about when they do their normal leadership.
There's this question of what sort of construct are we measuring? Is leadership a trait associated with an individual that you can measure like you measure IQ or personality? Or is it a set of behaviors that people do that don't really belong to them but change easily, so you can just observe, learn, and change your leadership behavior?
Then there's the difficulty of how do you measure something that often happens between people just one-on-one in private, in ad hoc moments, or in emails? People are notoriously bad at judging their behaviors or knowing how their behaviors appear to other people. You've just got to ask any bully who thought that they are indulging in a little bit of good-natured teasing to realize that if we were all good at knowing what we were like as leaders, then we probably wouldn't have bad leaders.
Drew: I think those are really big challenges and important challenges for the topic of leadership. But anything that we're trying to study in safety more broadly, can we define it? What is it? And how do we measure it? We've talked about it through the podcast, and we'll talk about that through this episode today. Because we'll talk about some research, we'll talk about some findings, but we'll need to position those findings within some of those broader challenges with how we research something like safety leadership in the first place.
Drew: Yeah, but having those challenges, we shouldn't say that safety leadership is definitely important. Regardless of whether it is leadership for safety or spatial construct, regardless of how we measure it. We know that there is a big influence between leadership behavior and worker behavior. If there was zero influence, then we wouldn't have managers, we wouldn't have leaders. We would just have workers, and then some of them would be leading others.
David: Drew, the paper for today is titled How Do Safety Leadership Behaviors Influence Worker Motivation for Safety. The authors are Gargi Sawhney and Konstantin Cigularov, both from the Department of Psychology at Clemson University in Virginia in the United States. This paper was published in the Journal of Business and Psychology in 2018, so it's a relatively recent study.
Before we get stuck into the specifics of the paper, Drew, I always quite enjoy reading these safety papers from people that I class as non-safety academics, because whenever they talk about safety, they generally bring interesting perspectives to the topic. Particularly in their introduction, and particularly when they're trying to justify why studying safety is important.
For example, in this study, the paper dive straight into the number of fatal accidents and the cost of those fatal accidents for businesses every year. But then what I found more interesting was you get good perspectives on accident causation, and at the start of this paper, they go on to suggest that we can improve safety in two ways.
We can either improve worker skills, or we can improve motivation to behave safely. And they are the two ways that we improve safety. Drew, what are your thoughts? Because you see a lot of papers in safety science, you read a lot of papers. Do you find differences between papers that are written by safety academics and non-safety academics in how they frame their research within models of accident causation or justifications for their research?
Drew: To be honest, we see many of the same things. There are some people who publish in safety who are deeply steeped in safety literature. And then there are people who, regardless of whether they're outside of safety, or they’re just maybe new to academic publishing. I guess the appropriate term is charmingly naive when it comes to presenting how accidents are caused and how they see the world, and often it's just a matter of a few simple words.
You can say there are two things that cause accidents, here they are, and you sound stupid. You say accidents are complicated, but here are two things that matter, and you sound less naive. Just that difference between acknowledging that these are important things or trying to claim that these are everything often makes all the difference between acknowledging that you're embedding this work in a much larger field and just choosing to focus on a couple of aspects.
David: Yeah, and the authors did a good job of situating their question within the broader literature because I suppose they didn't assume too much about the safety science literature. This paper actually had quite a good literature review on safety leadership and different models.
It was actually quite helpful. I found it quite interesting. They clearly (I suppose) situate this study within the literature and show that worker motivation (in their view) is really critical for preventing incidents. No matter how we understand how those incidents are caused, it's something that is important.
Drew, they said the aim of their study was to examine the effects on various safety leaders’ behaviors on safety motivation. And one of the things we talk about a lot on the Safety of Work podcast when we're talking about research design and questions is to understand the mechanism of what you're trying to influence.
These researchers said what we really want to know is safety motivation. We don't want to know how safety leader behaviors affect accidents. We just want to know the relationship between these behaviors and worker safety motivation. Thoughts on how they've approached (I suppose) understanding the mechanism they're trying to influence?
Drew: What is great and important is just how explicit they are about this, and that is always the problem. It's not how simple you make your study. It's how conscious you are of all of the stuff that you leave out. And so even though it sounds simple, we're just testing what is the relationship between behavior and motivation. You acknowledge that there may be things between those that you don't quite understand.
You acknowledge that there are things upstream from those you don't understand, things downstream from those that go from motivation to safety. You acknowledge that there are other ways leaders can influence behavior except through motivation.
Once you acknowledge and recognize all those things, it's quite okay to then strip the study down to these simple things. It's also worth pointing out, I'm fairly sure a number of our listeners are inclined to relatively new views of safety and may be very familiar with slogans like that no one comes to work to get hurt. And you may have a slightly instinctive reluctance to talk about this idea of motivation. But I just want to be clear that this is sort of embedded in the idea that no matter how safety is caused, one of the things that matter is the actions that people take at work.
Safety is not just about equipment, it is about human actions. And when we talk about motivation, we're not just saying I care about safety, therefore I will get hurt or won't get hurt. We're talking about whether you are motivated to take certain actions, and those actions that you're motivated to take will increase or decrease your likelihood of getting hurt.
Hopefully, no matter what sort of broad theoretical view is on safety, we can agree that some actions help, some actions that hinder, and being motivated to take actions that help you. Maybe, if you are in a very new view, you think that thing that would help is taking part in a learning team. Maybe if you're very behaviorist, you think that the thing that would help is wearing a hard hat.
Sorry, I'm being a little bit over-simplistic here. I just want to point out the extremes that both views do think that motivation matters, and so this isn't a controversial thing to say that leadership influencing motivation, influencing safety is a reasonable model.
David: No, I think it's a good model, Drew, and like you said, it's agnostic of what your underlying model of accident causation or safety theoretical perspective would be. The next good thing that this paper did is they said, look, there is a theory that tells us what might sit between leadership behaviors and worker motivation.
The researchers drew on the theory of planned behavior, which is a 1991 theory. It's 30 years old, and many of our listeners might have heard of the theory of planned behavior. But it talks about people's behavior is motivated by attitudes, norms, and perceived control over those behaviors.
The attitudes are individual to them, and in relation to safety motivation, the attitudes that we're going to talk about here are things like my attitude as an individual is to work safely rather than quickly. I prefer to be safe rather than just get my job done. I prefer to keep myself safe, even when it's a little bit inconvenient. These are my attitudes, and like I said, these things sit between leadership behaviors and my overall safety motivation.
The second one is norms. These are things that belong to the group or workplace standards. This is like the use of safety equipment. This is following safety procedures. This is voluntarily carrying out safety tasks and improvements. How we get at this is I’ll use safety equipment even when someone that I look up to is around, I'll follow safety procedures, or I'll do all of these tasks that I need to do like my risk assessments or all those things.
And then the third thing is this perceived control over safety behaviors, which is I have the power to change unsafe practices. I'm capable of taking action to prevent incidents. I can change the behavior of others. I can control whether I'm safe or not.
Drew, they set out this model. It starts on the left-hand side with safety leadership behaviors. It's got these three mediating factors in the middle: attitudes, norms, and perceived control. And then on the right-hand side, it's got this outcome (if you like) of this whole process of worker safety motivation. That's the model we're dealing with.
Drew: Long term listeners may remember back to (I believe it was) episode one when we were talking about behavior change programs in safety, and they were lamenting in their systematic review that lots of attempts to intervene in behavior change weren't based on theories.
The theory of planned behavior is one of the ones they say people should be using when they're planning out their interventions that you need to understand how whatever you're intervening alters each of these things, none of these things, or some of them in certain ways. Essentially, that's what we're talking about when we're studying leadership. We're saying, is leadership an effective intervention in behavior change, working through each of these aspects of the model?"
David: Drew, I might take a little tangent here because this idea of perceived control came up. It reminded me of some stuff that had been going on in the lab around the locus of control, around some other experiments that have been done, and this might actually be a topic that's worth its own podcast episode.
But this paper does mention a number of other research papers, as well as meta-analytic evidence, that reported that perceived control over behaviors is really positively correlated with safety behavioral interventions, increased safety behaviors, and reduced injuries. Is that your understanding of the literature?
Drew: Yes, it's one of these paradoxes in that you want managers to believe that safety is down to good management, and that only managers can really influence safety. But regardless of the truth of that, you want workers to believe that safety is entirely in their hands, and they have the ability to do certain actions, and that those actions will make a difference. You basically want everyone to blame themselves for safety in advance of the accident? We certainly don't want that afterward.
David: Yeah. We might tackle that in a separate podcast. There's also another one in the queue around the diffusion of responsibility, which talks a little bit to that as well. Listeners can look forward to those coming up at some point when we can—some episodes are easier to prepare and shorter to prepare than others. There's a few in the queue that I know are going to take some time, but they're going to be really good episodes—if I can find the time to prepare them.
Drew, the authors claim this to be the first study that tried to explore the impact of this range of leadership behaviors that we're going to talk about on safety motivations and obviously consider it really really important. Just a point here that I just wanted to make is there isn't actually a whole lot of research on safety leadership that's of useful quality, Drew, if that's a way of saying it.
For everything that we talk about in organizations about leadership and how that drives culture, felt leadership, and all these leadership behaviors that we want our leaders to be doing, there's actually not a lot of research which tells us whether what we're doing is useful or not useful. Just something for people to—as much as whatever your strength of belief is around this topic area, the evidence may not support your strength of belief.
Drew: Yeah, I think that's not only fair but perhaps generous, David. I’ll also say, to any of our people listening who are researchers, never claim in your study to be the first person ever to study something.
It is guaranteed that the moment after you've submitted your paper, you're going to find a paper from 10 years ago with a title almost identical to your own. Trying to claim when you're not a safety person to have the first study that studies the impact of a range of different leadership behaviors on safety motivation. You could claim to be the first good study perhaps, but that would be a little arrogant too.
David: Yeah. Drew, before we talk about the findings, we're going to talk about leadership behaviors, and then we're going to talk about what we're measuring, which is worker safety motivation. It's a bit dense here, but I think it's important because we will talk generally about leadership behaviors. And I will let our listeners know that when we get to the practical takeaways at the end, we'll be very specific about what some of these behaviors were that were in the study that will save them till the end.
I used what's called a Full Range Leadership Model, the FRL Model, which talks about three broad types of leadership behaviors: transformational leader behaviors, transactional leader behaviors, and laissez-faire leader behaviors. Drew, I might just go through some of these and then get your comments on the way through, if that's okay.
Drew: Go for it.
David: Transformational leader behaviors, and we talked about this in one of our episodes, which I’ll mention again in a little while. But this is where your leader is really visionary. They’re inspirational, motivating, and idealized. They’re stimulating the workforce. They’re elevating employees' sense of self-worth. They’re showing concern for employee well-being and acknowledging the individual strengths and challenges. They invest in employee development. They're literally trying to do what the title says—transform the organization through support and transformation of the people who work for them.
The authors cite a paper from Stacey Conchie in 2013, Drew, who we've had some of her papers on the podcast before and trust (if people might recall), and that paper and the research confirms that transformational leadership behaviors do positively correlate with employee safety motivation. So that's kind of a going in position for this research. Drew, do you have any thoughts on transformational leadership or context for that?
Drew: I don't have anything particularly to add, David, except to say these models are fairly long-standing. People have tried at various stages to update and change them in various ways. In ways that might be slightly more minimal maybe to measuring with psychometric instruments, which is what a lot of people do. People may have heard of Leader-Member Exchange Theory, which tries to get away from the transformational versus transactional.
I still think it's quite a reasonable way to view one approach to leaders. I think a lot of leaders would think of themselves in these terms.
David: I think, Drew, it actually applies not too bad to some specific safety questions and safety examples on the way through. All models are wrong and some are useful. This is somewhat useful for what we're trying to get at in this paper.
Transactional leader behaviors are the second ones, and they comprise three different dimensions. There are three dimensions here. They talk about contingent reward, then there's management by exception active, and management by exception passive.
I'm going to briefly explain these three when we go through, but primarily, transactional leader behaviors rest primarily on these exchanges between leaders and their followers. They are really operational, sort of daily exchanges around the work, the activities, and the needs of the manager. This contingent reward behavior is where leaders motivate employees to comply with safety policies by setting certain safety standards and providing incentives for compliance.
We talk about reward schemes. We think about behavioral safety programs. Here's a standard, here's a behavior that I want. I've told you what it is, and here are the incentives for you to follow it. And then engaging in management by exception active behaviors.
This is where leaders are closely monitoring their workers for any deviances, mistakes, and errors so that corrective action can be taken as soon as possible. The leaders walk on the floor, they're checking for unsafe acts, and they're enhancing employee safety motivation by checking and following up that things are being met.
And then the third transactional leadership type is leaders exhibiting management by exception passive behaviors, which means they're intervening after a problem is brought to their attention, or become serious enough to demand attention. They're not out there fighting the problems, but they're sitting in their office, and when someone walks in with a problem, they react, they go, and they try to sort it out.
This passive management by exception strategy is shown in the literature to probably be less likely to possibly impact worker safety motivation. They also called out in their literature review, Drew, at the start of this paper that no study had investigated the link between some of this management by exception, passive behaviors, and safety motivation.
What they're going in position around transactional leadership behaviors is these contingent rewards and this active management by exception processes were going to positively impact safety motivation from the research.
The last one there, Drew, is just laissez-faire leader behaviors, and this is a bit depressing really—maybe it felt a bit depressing anyway if you work for a leader like this—but it's really where leaders abdicate their responsibility. These leaders or the behaviors of these leaders are characterized by avoidance or relinquishment of their duties.
They fail to take action even when problems become obvious and chronic. They demonstrated indifference towards their employees' performance and wellbeing leads to frustration and ambiguity regarding what the appropriate safety behaviors are, thus reducing worker safety motivation.
Interestingly, Drew, the research around laissez-faire leadership does show a negative but non-significant relationship with employee safety motivation, which is kind of interesting. It seems that maybe someone's own personal desire for keeping themselves safe kicks in even when they've got a leader that doesn't care.
Drew: I have a little bit to say later on about the relationship between how these things are measured and what they actually are. We begin to see signs here that these are not neutral labels or neutral descriptions of behaviors that we're looking at.
It's actually built into the description that a laissez-faire behavior is a negative thing. And I suspect that the research would come up with very different results if you had a behavior, which was objectively similar, and you talked instead about leaders who delegate, leaders who grant their workers more autonomy, who give people permission to innovate and try doing things in different ways, or could technically come under that same laissez-faire behavior, except that it is deliberately phrased in a negative way that says these are leaders who are not doing things that they are supposed to be doing.
David: Yeah, quite right, Drew. As we just went through there, there were very judgmental and normative types of descriptions of those different three categories of leadership: transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire. We might talk about that on the way through because I want to flag some of the things with the measurements as well.
If we describe the leadership behaviors—and there are lots of specific questions that were asked in the survey that we'll talk about soon to get leadership behaviors—then for safety, motivation, the right-hand side of the model, the outcome of the research question, the best way I could think of describing this is to go straight to the questions that they asked in the study.
It was six questions where they just asked people like, to what extent, 1-5, do you agree or disagree that when I'm running behind schedule, I intend to follow the safety policies? I'm motivated to think of ways to make my workplace safer. I intend to follow my safety procedures all the time. I'm willing to comply with rules even when I'm not asked to. I plan to attend safety meetings and do safety activities even when they're not mandatory. And I make an effort to make sure that I'm working safely, and people around me are working safely as well.
These are the things that are used as a proxy for this idea of worker safety motivation, Drew. They're the two things. On one side we've got the leadership behaviors. On the other side, we've got this constructor worker safety motivation, and we're trying to look at the two.
Drew: I think it's worth pointing out, David—not necessarily for this study, but for making sense of how we measure safety, leadership, and things like motivation generally—that of these six items, four of them are about compliance. One of them is about discretionary but sort of positive safety behavior, attending things that are not mandatory. And the sixth one is genuinely about innovative proactive behavior, motivated to think of new ways to make my workplace a safer environment.
How we ask those questions is obviously going to influence leadership. If one leadership style is very good for compliance, then with four of the six questions about compliance, that's going to come up strong. If another leadership style encourages innovation but there's only one question out of six and the other five are almost like anti-innovation, how we measure the behaviors that we want is going to affect what leadership behaviors we find to be most effective.
David: Drew, hold that thought a little bit because I like the insight that you put out there about four of those questions being about compliance, and what leadership behavior might suit that. And maybe what's being measured here isn't worker safety motivation, it's worker safety compliance motivation. For example, what construct are we actually measuring by the questions we're asking? Drew, I might go straight to the method now, and then we'll roll through the findings.
It was a survey, and they ended up cobbling together a battery of surveys, which is pretty typical of psychology. They had five different things they wanted to measure. They wanted to measure leadership behaviors. They wanted to measure norms, attitudes, perceived control over behavior, and worker safety motivation.
They went and formed up these things. I think they might have even drawn from Zohar’s climate surveys around some of that motivational stuff. They took Barling’s transformational leadership questions. They took a whole range of stuff, and they pulled together this survey.
They recruited 168 members, Drew, using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but I wasn't. I had to go and surf it a little bit. It's an online marketplace like Airtasker, which is basically just a place where you can go and just recruit people for anything that you might want to do. Drew, are you familiar with MTurk?
Drew: It gets used a lot in psychology research, and the cynical version of it is you've successfully recruited 1000 Indian teenagers who have successfully pretended to be American firefighters in the screening survey. This is always the danger when you pay people to participate in research is they do have an incentive to give the answers that they think will result in further invitations to further surveys and further pay.
You will notice, as we go through the method, that they did actually build in a bunch of stuff to stop the real problem with things like this, which is people just scooting through an answer to every question really quickly without even thinking about the answers in order to collect the paycheck and move on to the next survey.
David: Yeah, it's a good point, Drew. They ended up with 168 people doing this survey, and like you said, all of these people were employed in high-risk industries and occupations. They used examples of policing, nursing, or firefighting.
What they said is this MTurk system gives us access to a diverse sample, and what they basically did is offered people 10 cents to complete a demographic survey, which is the filter survey. They got 1484 people to do that.
The person had to be employed. They asked them about what industry they worked in. They asked about how much safety training they'd done in the last 12 months. They asked them all these questions to see whether they qualified for the survey. So 416 of these 1484 people qualified to do the 10-minute survey. Then they paid those 416 people 75 cents or offered them 75 cents and 285 of them replied.
Drew, like you said, they put four attention check questions, and we talked about attention check questions in one of our other episodes where they just say you get to question 13 or something, and they say, the answer to question 13 is select 2. They put four of these, and it's fascinating that 34 people failed either 0, 1, or 2 of the checks.
Drew, I don't know how you fail. You've got to be pretty unlucky to fail all four of those checks. Even if you just went all fives, you've been done by the design of the questionnaire to fail all four checks. They pulled people who failed zero, one, or two out, and it was 34 of those people. They left the people who failed only one of the checks in because it could have been a mistake, and the results didn't really change the overall pool anyway.
They ended up with 251 people. Then what they did is—this was a prospective design, Drew, so they did another sample three months later. They offered $1.20 to see if they could get those 251 people to do the second one, and that's how they ended up with 168 people who qualified through the demographics, did the first survey, and then did the second survey. That's the pool, but we have no idea who these 168 people are.
Drew: That's correct. What we know is that those 168 people claimed on a demographic survey to match certain criteria.
David: The questionnaire—I talked specifically before about what it was—a 22 item leadership behavior questionnaire that was sort of a five-point scale. One from, does my leader do this one? One—not at all, to five—my leader does this frequently or always.
It came from a range of literature. Like I said, the transformational questions came from Barling’s research, which we talked about in episode 26 where we talked about, is good safety leadership just good leadership?
They had four items on attitudes towards safety behaviors, six items on norms, and four items on perceived control. This is where you mentioned before about the four questions on compliance. The researchers developed their own six-item measure for safety motivation. They essentially said that a lot of the other questionnaires and literature around motivation was attitudinal rather than specifically behavioral. So they developed their own six-item questionnaire.
I think what they claim is that when they did a one-factor model, they said that the results, the statistical testing was acceptable to fit the data. What this actually means, Drew—if I understand this correctly—is they've got these six questions. They tested these six questions on the first sample—not the three months later, but the first sample—and it actually said, oh, you're probably actually not quite just measuring one thing when you're looking at this.
Drew: Which is no surprise given that all of the research on using surveys to measure safety behavior comes up with at least two and sometimes as many as four different categories of safety behavior. But that's irrelevant for what they're trying to check in this survey anyway. What they're really saying is, okay, we know these might be different types of behaviors, but is it sufficient to lump them all together? And statistically, yes, it is.
David: Drew, do you want to talk a little bit more about any of the qualifiers in relation to the research design or the methods before we jump into the findings?
Drew: Thanks for the opportunity, David, because I almost laughed out loud at the researchers’ critiquing much of the literature as being attitudinal rather than behavioral. [...] may know I teach a research methods course for people in first year university. The first thing we say when we talk about surveys is surveys can only measure attitudes. Surveys are what people tell you that they think.
You can't measure a behavior using a survey. You measure behavior by going and watching what someone does. This is the qualifier you need to put whenever you do survey research, which is not to say that survey research is bad. It's just that it has limitations.
Whenever you do a survey, you're always talking about what people perceive or what they intend, not what they do. And you've got to keep mentally inserting those words if the authors don't do it themselves. What the survey checks is not, do leadership behaviors influence employee motivations? What the survey checks are whether how someone perceives their leader’s behavior influences their own intended behavior.
Now, then in itself—as long as we insert the perceived and intended—is a reasonable question to ask and it's a reasonable way to answer it. But never make the jump and say, okay, so this is our best approximation of real behavior. It's not. We have no knowledge of the link between employees' perceptions of their leaders’ behaviors and the actual leaders’ behaviors. We've never checked that. Just don't assume that perception matches reality at all.
David: Yeah, Drew. They're good points for people to note, and I might just reiterate some of that before we go into the findings because on one hand, this is a 20-page paper, very strong literature review, very strong basis in an established theory, and published in a reputable psychology journal quite recently by some very well trained and capable academics.
On the other hand, we can say this is a survey of what people report that their leaders do, and what then they report that they're going to do from 168 eight people that we really don't know who they are or where they work.
I suppose there are two ways to look at the same article, and when we talk about the findings, put some of that in context. But nevertheless, there are some interesting insights here and some good practical takeaways for us to think about.
At a topline level, they found that yes, safety specific transformational leadership. Safety specific transformational leadership, and then in the transactional leadership space, this contingent reward and this active management by exception. All those three leadership behaviors that constitute those three types of leadership all positively relate to safety motivation.
The management by exception passive style of transactional leadership and the laissez-faire leadership style behaviors do not exhibit any relationship with safety motivation. Drew, they didn't say they negatively impact safety motivation. They just don't have a consistent correlation with either positively or negatively with safety motivation. What you expected, Drew, based on how you saw the survey?
Drew: When you put together what we were talking about before about how they were characterizing the leadership behaviors and these being perceptions, then what we're seeing is the leadership behaviors that people perceive as positive are the ones that people say causes them to have greater safety motivation.
In those terms, I think, yes, this is absolutely expected. People with positive perceptions of their own leaders also have positive perceptions of their own safety motivation and behavior. I guess what surprised me is actually just the lack of relationship in the opposite direction that people with horrible perceptions of their leaders don't then say, we've got bad safety behaviors.
David: Yeah, and I think that that's really interesting. I think then, again, comes to how you ask the question because those questions were very personal. Even if you've got a really bad leader, the way you're asking a worker safety motivation is what they do or how they report they're going to act. It's like if you're asking questions more in a safety climate, I think you'd see a negative correlation when you were asking those people about the workplace more broadly in relation to that leadership impact, but just a hypothesis that I might [...].
Drew: That's a good point. You're saying that even if people don't like their leader, they're still not going to say, oh, and I behave badly.
David: Yeah, well, maybe not. Furthermore, Drew, I might get you to explain this a little bit because you might do a better job of it than me. So safety attitudes and safety norms, these two factors in between the leadership behaviors and the worker safety motivation. They mediated the relationship between leadership behavior and the safety motivation. But then they found that this perceived safety control did not mediate the leader behavior, safety motivation relationship for any of the five different types of leadership behaviors.
The transformational, the laissez-faire, and the three transactional. I found this a little bit surprising that this perceived safety control—because we know that it relates to worker safety motivation—didn't play a mediating role here. You just kind of described what these findings mean in relation to how these factors mediate the relationship.
Drew: I think the authors are being a little bit disingenuous with the way they're reporting these results. When we say that something mediates, we're basically saying it's like a multiplier in the middle. So you feed the leadership behavior into the mediator. It gets multiplied or divided, and then it comes out again and influences the thing at the far end.
The model of leadership and behavior that they're using to start with says that all of these things should be mediators. They should be things in the middle that multiply or divide the leaders’ behavior. General safety attitudes should have an influence as well. Safety norms should have an influence. Perceived safety control should have an influence.
You're expecting to find all of those things have an influence or your model doesn't work, and what they found is that two of the things did and one of the things didn't, which contradicts the theory of planned behavior. They're saying that our first findings are consistent. No, you take all the findings together. You've just broken the model.
David: Yeah, and Drew, like you said, the model might not be broken. But again, when you come to how you design surveys, it just might be that they ask questions that actually didn't get at what was in their model.
Drew: Yeah, that's actually far more likely. It's just that trying to do that fine-grained modeling about behavior when you're not actually measuring behavior is always going to be tricky.
David: And if you look at the perceived, even if you just think about it now, the questions they asked for perceived safety control, which is like, I can take action to keep myself safe and all of this. And then the worker motivation was all about compliance, following the rules, and following the procedures. You could see how there could be some disconnect between the questions around autonomy and the perceived safety control, and the full compliance questions in the worker safety motivation questionnaire.
Drew: Yes, absolutely. A lot of those ideas around control, the ability to either change your own behavior or change your own environment. And if the questions aren't really about that, they're just about easy compliance, then the locus of control becomes much less relevant.
David: Drew, in these findings, we've got a whole range of leadership behaviors. The conclusion that these two specific types of transactional leadership behaviors around providing clear standards and rewards, and then actively going in monitoring for noncompliances, as well as the visionary transformational leadership behaviors are going to have a positive impact on worker motivation.
We understand that by seeing how those leadership behaviors impact the attitudes and the norms within the people and the groups in the workforce. Do you want to make any other comments in relation to these results before we dive into the practical takeaways?
Drew: I think the limitations of this study give some indication for why we haven't progressed much with our understanding of safety leadership. I know I've been guilty of complaining that we talk too much about leadership as if it's just a single thing, and we should have good leadership versus bad leadership. But this study shows how hard it is to actually pin down what good leadership counts as. Because it would be very easy to look at the different styles of leadership here and say, okay, this study says we should have some styles of leadership and not others.
At first glance, it might seem to say that we want a very active leader of behaviors. We want leaders who are closely engaged with safety, and that's much less important than leaders who, for example, grant autonomy, which might be considered laissez-faire and therefore bad. But that would be reading too much into these results.
The fair thing to say is that because we're looking at perceptions, what we can say is that leaders who successfully communicate their safety expectations to staff are perceived by those staff to be active safety leaders. And when people think that they've got active safety leaders, they themselves are more motivated for safety.
It doesn't tell us, though, what are the right leadership behaviors to create the right perceptions and expectations. And it's very easy to read into it our own beliefs about how leaders should behave, and just associate those with the positive things in the study.
David: Yeah, I think that's a good reflection, Drew, and good suggestions for considerations for people when they're thinking about the findings of this research. This is about our listeners and what we hope with our listeners in the safety profession more broadly, as well as being critical consumers of research—really being able to read a study for what it is, and no more or no less than what it's telling you.
Drew, if we go to practical takeaways now. We've got a general conclusion that leadership behavior does impact the safety motivation of workers. And like you said, this is not something that we should worry about stating because it's true for every theory. We need to understand what's motivating the actions of people because the actions of people directly contribute to the safety of our systems within our organization.
I pulled out some of the questions that were asked because I think they're a good way of talking about these behaviors and saying, well, what are these behaviors that can contribute to worker safety motivation? I might just do some of these and then feel free to jump in and comment on any of these.
What the study found was this contingent reward leadership, this transactional leadership style of providing contingent rewards contributed the most to safety norms. The shared practices in the organization around safety can be positively influenced by things that leaders do like expressing leader's satisfaction when the workers meet their safety expectations and giving recognition when workers complete their work safely, as opposed to quickly, for example.
These norms like recognizing the use of safety equipment, the following of safety procedures, people carrying out safety tasks and improvements voluntarily, leaders being engaged when these things are happening, and visibly supporting and recognizing these things will influence the safety norms within the business, according to this research.
Drew: I think that gels with what a lot of us have experienced. I remember working for one nameless organization where every time a project was completed, an email would come around from the managing director to the whole company saying, congratulations to the project team on successful handover of the project.
I remember the safety manager was just fighting to have included in that recognition email, and we completed all of the safety on time. And to withhold the general congratulations email if that wasn't true. And it was a fight to just get leaders to recognize that completion of safety was something that deserved recognition.
David: Yeah, that's good advice for safety professionals and for leaders. The second practical takeaways would be that transformational leadership contributed the most to safety attitudes.
These attitudes of people working safely rather than quickly and prioritizing being safe rather than getting the work done. These questions that contribute to their personal safety attitudes were most influenced by this transformational leadership and some of the behaviors here about leaders providing continuous encouragement to workers to do their job safely. Leaders showing a determination to create and maintain a safe work environment. Leaders give workers the opportunity to suggest ways of doing their job more safely. Leaders who encourage their workers to express their ideas and their opinions about safety at work.
Leaders who talk about their values and beliefs and their own personal importance of safety and what it means to them to keep their workers safe. Leaders that behave in a way that displays a commitment to a safe workplace—things like role modeling. Leaders who spend time coaching, mentoring, and getting involved in showing workers the safest way to do things that work. And leaders who listen to workers' concerns about workplace safety.
What is that, eight leadership behaviors there in the transformational category? This came out of the questions that were asked in the study for people to rate. What do you think about that list?
Drew: I think it's a good list for the outputs, as in remembering that these are what workers perceived of their managers. That they perceived that these things were genuinely true.
I think it's often harder for us as leaders to sincerely show those things. I can imagine people trying to do each one of those things, and actually being perceived by other people as being insincere in expressing a lot of those things. So that's the trick is to actually sincerely and be seen to manage all of those things contributing to safety attitudes, not just making activities that tokenistic ticked the boxes.
David: Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. I think the perceptions of people will see the activity for what it is based on the genuine intent of the leader and the way they’re carrying out the activities, regardless of what the activity is.
And then the last one, Drew, the last practical takeaways is this idea of active management by exception. This is one that leaders who keep track of the safety mistakes and the incidents within the workplace. Leaders who concentrate their attention on dealing with complaints and with failures. Leaders directing their attention towards work that fails to meet the safety standards. And leaders that focus on the irregularities, the exceptions, and the deviations from the safety standards and practices.
These management by exception activities were shown to influence worker safety motivation. Drew, this is one that I wouldn't mind you to take away. I don't really know how to talk about this, because like you said, on one hand, we've got worker safety motivation questions that are quite compliance orientated. But on the other hand, fear is also a motivator.
If I've got a manager who is managing by exception—even if it's active and they're going around and finding mistakes—that could motivate me, but maybe motivate me in the way that my organization doesn't necessarily want workers to be motivated about safety.
Drew: Yeah, this is the point where we don't want to read too much into it, given that we know that they were measuring behavior mainly by compliance intention. And we know from other research that compliance intention doesn't necessarily mean safe behavior.
David: Yeah. Most of the stuff is not too bad, but my personal opinion here, I wouldn't be necessarily trying to encourage all your leaders to concentrate all their attention on mistakes, failure to meet standards, and those types of things. But look, the research shows that's going to have some motivation on your workers’ intentions to be safe. That’s rather a little bit conflicted with the research in this paper and what I think, Drew, but not reading too much into it is the thing to do here.
Drew: Yeah, I'm not going to encourage anyone to take away the idea that good leaders keep track of all their subordinate safety mistakes.
David: Drew, the question we asked today was, how do safety leadership behaviors influence worker motivation for safety? And the answer is that leadership behaviors do have an influence on the safety attitudes and the norms among other things related to the individual in the workplace. And these attitudes and norms in turn have an influence on worker safety motivation.
Drew: And David, we can also take away that leadership is a hard thing to think about it. It's not something with easy answers, and it's something that we do intend to explore the research a bit more. You mentioned that next week, we might see if we can get a paper from outside safety that gives a bit more of a sophisticated look at measuring leadership behaviors.
David: Yeah, I thought we'd do two weeks on safety leadership because that's what our listeners suggested they want to learn more about, and we've trolled the safety leadership literature and it's not that compelling.
What I thought I'd do for next week, Drew, is to go into the organizational sites' management literature and try to find an interesting question and some sound research in relation to leadership that we might be able to draw some parallels back into safety leadership.
Drew: Okay, very cool. We hope you found this episode thought-provoking and ultimately useful in shaping the safety of work in your own organization. Join us on LinkedIn or send any comments, questions, or ideas for future episodes to feedback@safetyofwork.com.