Compliance to safety protocols as a function of leadership style, sense of control and perceived safety climate

A quasi-quantitative study was conducted in an aerospace manufacturing environment to investigate to what extent, if at all, managers' leadership style, as rated by their employees, had a relationship to the managers' average compliance to employee safety protocols, sense of control, and safety climate. All the managers supervised touch labor employees who build product. The Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire Form 5x (Bass & Avolio, 2000) was administered to 493 employees who assessed their managers' (n = 32) leadership style. These same employees used the Organizational Safety Climate Questionnaire (Zohar, 2000) to rate their perceptions of how their manager responds to safety issues in the workplace. Each manager completed the Shapiro Control Inventory, General Domain of Control (Shapiro, 1994) to assess their general sense of control (SCIG). The relationships between these variables were examined using Spearman Rank Order correlations. The results suggest that the manager's sense of control has no relationship to their employees' compliance to safety protocols. Managers who scored high on transformational leadership also had higher safety compliance scores (rs = .85) and managers who scored high on laissez-faire leadership had lower safety compliance scores (rs = -.66). The transactional leadership construct did not correlate with compliance to safety protocols or safety climate. There were no significant relationships between the SCIG and any of the leadership constructs. There was a significant relationship between safety climate and the transformational leadership construct ( rs = .79) and a negative correlation between safety climate and laissez-faire leadership construct (rs = -.66). In general, this study suggests that managers who are rated by their employees as exhibiting transformational leadership attributes are more likely to have higher safety compliance rates and their employees perceive the safety climate as more positive. It was also found that safety climate was significantly correlated with compliance to safety protocols (rs = .86). Managers who were rated high on laissez-faire leadership tended to have a negative impact on compliance to safety protocols and safety climate.