A meta-analysis of leadership and workplace safety: Examining relative importance, contextual contingencies, and methodological moderators.

Abstract

Given the high human and economic costs of workplace safety, researchers and practitioners have paid increasing attention to how leadership behaviors relate to workplace safety. Previous research has demonstrated that leadership behaviors are important for workplace safety. In this meta-analysis, we extend our understanding of the leadership-workplace safety relationship by (a) examining the associations between a broader range of five leadership categories-change-oriented, relational-oriented, task-oriented, passive, and destructive-and seven workplace safety variables; (b) investigating the relative importance of these leadership categories in explaining variance in these workplace safety variables; and (c) testing contextual and methodological contingencies of the leadership-workplace safety relationship. Using effect sizes from 194 samples (N = 104,364), we find that although leadership behaviors are associated with workplace safety, the leadership categories vary considerably in their relative importance. Task-oriented leadership followed by relational-oriented leadership emerge as the most important contributors to workplace safety. Change-oriented leadership (which includes transformational leadership) does not emerge as the largest contributor for any of the seven tested safety variables, despite it being the most frequently examined leadership model in the workplace safety literature. Effectiveness of leadership behaviors in relation to workplace safety varies by national culture power distance, industry risk, workforce age, as well as by contextualized forms of leadership (i.e., safety-specific vs. generalized). Finally, there is meta-analytic evidence for publication bias and common-method variance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).