In the complex and high-risk underground environment of coal mining, ensuring occupational health and safety is a fundamental pillar of social sustainability. Traditional safety compliance is insufficient to prevent unpredictable accidents and sustain long-term enterprise resilience. Thus, fostering proactive safety citizenship behavior is essential for enhancing organizational resilience. Drawing on the cognitive appraisal theory of stress, this study constructs a double-edged sword model of felt accountability on miners’ safety citizenship behavior. A three-wave time-lagged survey was conducted among 375 frontline coal miners in China, with data analyzed using SPSS 26.0 and AMOS 24.0. The findings show that felt accountability can increase work engagement and promote employee safety citizenship behavior, while also enhancing psychological strain and inhibiting employee safety citizenship behavior. In addition, safety-specific transformational leadership amplifies the positive impact of felt accountability on work engagement and mitigates its effects on psychological strain. These findings enrich our understanding of the impact of felt accountability, and provide practical insights for coal enterprise managers to improve sustainable safety performance and foster a socially sustainable work environment.
Qin et al. (Thu,) studied this question.