Socio-Technical Coupling in Safety Governance Under Performance Pressure: A Cross-Level Study of Formal, Material, and Relational Carriers

Against the backdrop of broadly similar safety regulation, firms in high-risk industries continue to differ in day-to-day safety governance. This study draws on distributed-cognition and socio-technical systems perspectives to examine how formal, material, and relational carriers help senior-management safety prioritization acquire a recorded organizational footprint under performance pressure. We conceptualize institutionalization, digital safety system support, and team safety climate as interdependent carriers and analyze three-wave, multi-source data from 183 firms and 667 teams in Chinese high-risk industries. Firm-level operational leading indicators (OLI) from safety-management records serve as the primary recorded-outcome layer. OLI analyses show that institutionalization and digital safety system support are robustly associated with the overall recorded-indicator composite; team safety climate, by contrast, aligns most clearly with proactive reporting. The three carriers leave carrier-specific signatures across recorded-indicator bundles: institutionalization in closed-loop rectification, digital safety system support in digital-system activity, and team safety climate in proactive reporting. Performance pressure operates mainly as an additive contextual force in the recorded layer. The findings contribute to Systems scholarship on entangled socio-technical resilience by identifying how managerial priorities acquire organizational reach through differentiated carrier coupling in the recorded organizational layer.