On Research: Building a team safety climate

What’s your study about?

In view of the increasing adoption of team operation mode in high-risk industries, it’s necessary for researchers to study leadership style and employee safety behavior from a multilevel perspective. Based on social learning theory, collective social learning theory and expectancy-valence theory, this study examined the relationship between team safety-specific transformational leadership and employee safety behavior, as well as some mediating effects.

Why were you and your colleagues interested in this topic?

Our research interest and ideas originated from our field observations on employees in a high-risk petrochemical enterprise, who were found to work primarily in teams. We think that when individual employees are in the team, the team as a whole may play a greater normative and guiding role. The team leader may exert their effects on the team, for example, by stimulating the team safety climate or team safety motivation.

What are the biggest takeaways from this study?

For employers, they should be aware that workers will observe, imitate and learn from their leaders’ behaviors. Therefore, employers should practice what they’re preaching by showing their safety priorities and their care for employees’ personal safety. Also, in daily management, they should pay attention to the construction of the whole team and establish a common safety goal to build the overall team safety climate and motivation. In terms of workers, they should strengthen their safety-related communication between themselves and other team members, and show their pursuit of the team’s common safety goal to improve their own safety behavior. And once other colleagues do the same, it can create a virtuous cycle among the whole team.

Did anything about the results surprise you?

When it comes to the surprising results, we think it’s the mediating role of team safety motivation. Generally speaking, leaders may think that safety behaviors are driven by individual safety motivation. However, our research shows that the safety motivation of the team can be triggered by safety-specific transformational leadership and could further affect individual safety behavior, which can remind us to avoid blaming a single employee while ignoring the problems of the whole team.

The study abstract is available at ScienceDirect.