Safety leadership and safety voices: exploring the mediation role of proactive motivations

Motivating employees to speak up about safety issues in organizations is a daunting task for both scholars and practitioners. Previous research has shown that safety leadership is one of the most studied predictors because of its wide-reaching effects on safety behaviors. This contribution aims to test whether Parker et al.’s proactive motivational states (‘can do,’ ‘reason to,’ and ‘energized to’ motivations) mediate the relationship between transformational, transactional, and passive safety leadership and an expanded set of safety voice behaviors, a form of upwards safety communication. We tested our model using data gathered from a sample (N = 238) of US workers. Our results showed that (1) all three motivational states mediate the relationship between transformative leadership and promotive safety voice; (2) only ‘reason to’ and ‘energized to’ mediate the relationship between transactional leadership and preventive and prohibitive safety voices; and (3) only ‘can do’ motivations mediate the relationship between passive leadership and hostile safety voices. Implications for research and practice are also discussed: these results may be leveraged to improve practitioners’ ability to motivate employees to speak up, a notoriously difficult task, by considering the employees’ motivational drivers. We found that, in the safety realm, the relationship between a leader’s behavior and their followers’ safety behavior is partially mediated by employees’ belief that they are able to broaden their workplace role, their feeling of ownership, and their engagement.