Latest / Safe As Podcast / E19: Leadership for safety - silver bullet or hype?

Transcript

E19: Leadership for safety - silver bullet or hype? · Safe As Podcast

• 0:06
  We often put leaders on a pedestal, seeing their efforts
• 0:10
  as a magic bullet for every organisational challenge,
• 0:13
  especially when it comes to workplace safety.
• 0:15
  But what if that romanticised vision isn't telling the whole
• 0:19
  story? What happens when we look at the
• 0:22
  evidence? Good day everyone.
• 0:24
  I'm Ben Hutchinson and This is Safe as a podcast dedicated to
• 0:28
  the thrifty analysis of safety, risk and performance research.
• 0:32
  Visit safetyinsights.org for more research.
• 0:35
  Today's study is a comprehensive meta analysis by Lee Teak ET al,
• 0:41
  2022 in general of applied psychology.
• 0:44
  It's titled A Meta Analysis of Leadership and Workplace Safety,
• 0:49
  examining relative importance, contextual contingencies, and
• 0:52
  methodological moderators. Ultimately, they were interested
• 0:56
  in how leadership influences different elements of workplace
• 0:59
  safety based on a few different measures.
• 1:02
  The research has conducted a merit analysis, which is a
• 1:04
  method that combines results from multiple studies for more
• 1:08
  robust conclusions. They synthesised data from 194
• 1:12
  samples, collectively evolving over 104,000 participants.
• 1:17
  Their work examined the links between 5 broad categories of
• 1:21
  leadership behaviours, change oriented, relational oriented,
• 1:25
  task oriented, passive and destructive, and then seven
• 1:29
  different workplace safety variables.
• 1:32
  So as a preamble, there's a lot of research on leadership, often
• 1:36
  not so critical. So I present this research today
• 1:40
  as a example of some of the more positive facets of leadership.
• 1:44
  But to keep things interesting, I'll cover a couple of critical
• 1:48
  studies of leadership in the future pods, ones that even
• 1:51
  challenge the stable construct of leadership.
• 1:54
  So a quick definition of what these leadership styles are.
• 1:57
  So change oriented leadership. It's focused on initiating
• 2:00
  change, emphasising long term vision improvements and
• 2:03
  innovation. This includes transformational
• 2:06
  leadership, relational leadership.
• 2:09
  It aims at building and improving relationships, showing
• 2:11
  concerns for followers, well being.
• 2:14
  Task oriented leadership focuses on achieving specific
• 2:18
  organisational outcomes like clear instructions, defining
• 2:21
  roles, monitoring performance, Passive leadership characterised
• 2:26
  by an absence of objectives or inaction, with leaders only
• 2:29
  engaging when a problem can no longer be ignored.
• 2:33
  And destructive leadership describes behaviours aimed at
• 2:36
  harming followers or the organisation.
• 2:38
  So hostile actions, intimidation, rudeness.
• 2:42
  The safety variables examined in the study range from sort of
• 2:45
  tangible safety outcomes like incident data also to safety
• 2:49
  performance measures like compliance participation or
• 2:52
  other elements like safety knowledge, motivation, climate,
• 2:55
  attitudes. There's a little bit of other
• 2:57
  things and other contextual factors like national culture
• 3:00
  and things like that. So what did they find?
• 3:04
  Well, the meta analysis confirms that overall leadership
• 3:07
  behaviours are actually associated with proxies of
• 3:10
  workplace safety. So constructive leadership
• 3:14
  behaviours, those focus on change relationships and tasks
• 3:18
  were generally found to be positively related to various
• 3:20
  aspects of workplace safety. Again, is very narrowly defined
• 3:24
  by their measures of safety. Conversely, negative leadership
• 3:29
  behaviours such as passive and destructive styles were largely
• 3:33
  associated with lower levels of workplace safety.
• 3:36
  Not too surprising, the study did provide some nuances around
• 3:39
  the importance and strengths of leadership categories.
• 3:42
  So, task oriented leadership consistently emerge as a
• 3:46
  significant contributor to workplace safety.
• 3:49
  It explained the largest amount of variance in the constructs
• 3:52
  like safety, climate, motivation, appliance and
• 3:55
  participation. This means leaders who provide
• 3:58
  clear instructions to find roles and monitor adherence to
• 4:02
  processes tend to have a stronger positive impact.
• 4:06
  Relational oriented leadership also proved to be highly
• 4:09
  important. It was often the second most
• 4:12
  influential category and notably contributed most to safety
• 4:15
  attitudes and safety knowledge, though based on fewer studies
• 4:19
  form those conclusions. This type of leadership focusing
• 4:23
  on building quality relationships and showing
• 4:26
  concern for followers, was particularly influential for
• 4:28
  personal safety orientations. Change oriented leadership,
• 4:33
  including transformational leadership, despite being
• 4:36
  frequently studied, did not emerge as the single largest
• 4:39
  contributor for any of the seven safety variables examined.
• 4:43
  While it still showed positive associations with many safety
• 4:46
  variables like climate and appliance, its relative
• 4:50
  importance for safety was found to be less prominent.
• 4:52
  Invented task orientated and relational approaches.
• 4:56
  Passive leadership characterised by an action had a sizable
• 4:59
  negative influence across several safety constructs.
• 5:03
  And then destructive leadership, as expected, showed negative
• 5:06
  associations. So for instance, with safety
• 5:09
  climate attitudes and safety outcomes.
• 5:12
  However, the number of samples for destructive leadership was
• 5:14
  relatively small. So some core messages or
• 5:18
  conclusions that come out of this.
• 5:20
  So it suggests that when it does come to workplace safety, it's
• 5:23
  not just about having leaders, it's which kind of leader in how
• 5:26
  they act, how they role model. The data points to leaders who
• 5:30
  are clear about tasks and processes, who genuinely care
• 5:33
  about their employees. These are particularly effective
• 5:36
  in fostering a safe work environment.
• 5:39
  While inspiring a shared vision is valuable, the day to day
• 5:43
  hands on management and interpersonal support seem to be
• 5:46
  more directly impactful for safety measures.
• 5:49
  Probably not too surprising. And equally important, leaders
• 5:53
  who are disengaged or actively harmful can significantly
• 5:57
  undermine safety efforts. Some other contextual factors?
• 6:01
  Well, they found that leadership effectiveness isn't universal.
• 6:04
  It does depend on the context. So in high risk industries, task
• 6:08
  oriented leadership becomes even more critical.
• 6:11
  Employees in such settings expect clear directions, clear
• 6:15
  role modelling, and have less tolerance for ambiguity or
• 6:19
  passive leadership. National culture, especially
• 6:22
  power distance, also plays a role.
• 6:25
  In cultures with lower power distance, egalitarian and
• 6:29
  relationship focused leaders may be more effective, while higher
• 6:32
  power distance cultures may seem greater effectiveness from task
• 6:36
  oriented leaders who provide clear directives for younger
• 6:40
  workers. Change oriented leadership had
• 6:42
  stronger positive associations with like safety, climate or
• 6:45
  compliance and outcomes compared to older workers, aligning with
• 6:50
  theories that younger individuals may be more
• 6:53
  receptive to growth oriented leadership.
• 6:56
  Lastly, safety specific leadership, the latest focus
• 7:00
  that behaves explicitly on safety issues, generally had
• 7:02
  stronger associations with safety variables to better
• 7:06
  generalised leadership. This is a really important
• 7:08
  finding. Some people are very critical
• 7:10
  around this concept of safety leadership or safety vision or
• 7:13
  adding safety onto things. But we actually have a lot of
• 7:17
  research that shows domain specificity is often a real
• 7:21
  thing. And domain specificity often
• 7:24
  does result in additional benefits over generalised
• 7:27
  concepts. So safety leadership can
• 7:30
  actually have additional benefits over just generalised
• 7:33
  leadership. And this applies to other
• 7:34
  constructs in safety. So what do we make of the
• 7:37
  findings? Invest wisely in leadership
• 7:40
  development. Probably prioritise developing
• 7:43
  leaders in task orientated and particularly relational
• 7:46
  interpersonal behaviours. Consider a blended approach.
• 7:50
  So, leaders with different sorts of backgrounds, capabilities,
• 7:55
  having cognitive diversity and other forms of diversity,
• 7:58
  understanding context. Leaders should tailor their
• 8:01
  approach based on the factors like the industry, the risk,
• 8:04
  national culture and Poly age. Absolutely address negative
• 8:09
  leadership behaviours. This underscores the damaging
• 8:12
  effects of passive and destructive leadership.
• 8:15
  They have to be actively managed and focus on safety specific
• 8:19
  communication domain specificity.
• 8:21
  When leaders explicitly focus their communication and actions
• 8:25
  on safety, it tends to have a more potent effect.
• 8:28
  So a range of limitations as you'd expect.
• 8:31
  I won't go through all of them, but there was a relatively
• 8:35
  limited basis for some of the leadership styles around the
• 8:37
  research. A lot of the studies were cross
• 8:40
  sectional so it's really hard to form direct cause effect
• 8:44
  relationships. And something I found
• 8:46
  interesting, the analysis assumed a linear relationship,
• 8:49
  but some research suggests it might be curvilinear.
• 8:52
  So for instance, A curvilinear relationship means that when it
• 8:55
  comes to leadership and safety, more isn't always better.
• 9:00
  There might be an optimal level for certain leadership
• 9:02
  behaviours, and pushing too far beyond that point could actually
• 9:06
  become less effective or even detrimental to safety.
• 9:09
  And another key limitation with this sorts of leadership
• 9:13
  research is that it's so myopically focused on leaders,
• 9:17
  not the followers. There's this whole concept
• 9:19
  called followership that's often emitted from this research.
• 9:23
  Maybe I'll cover that another day.
• 9:25
  Finally, there's evidence for publication bias, common method
• 9:28
  variants, and more. That's it on Safe As I'm Ben
• 9:31
  Hutchinson. Please help share, rate and
• 9:34
  review and checkoutsafetyinsights.org for
• 9:37
  more research. Finally, feel free to support
• 9:41
  Safe As by shouting a coffee link in the show notes.