Safety leadership support behaviors: examining how and why leaders demonstrate commitment during safety interventions

Safety leadership is recognized in the organizational literature as essential to the success of safety interventions and, more broadly, to workplace safety outcomes (Barling et al., 2002; Zohar & Luria, 2004; Mullen & Kelloway, 2009; Schein, 2010; Taitz et al., 2012; Nielsen et al., 2013). Despite decades of evidence linking employee attitudes, behaviors, and performance to safety leadership, the underlying processes through which it is enacted and fostered remains underexplored. This dissertation examined how safety leadership commitment is expressed and operationalized within the context of safety interventions. Study One qualitatively investigated how leaders behaviorally demonstrate their commitment by analyzing an archival dataset. Study Two developed and evaluated a unidimensional, eight-item scale designed to capture the safety leadership support behaviors identified in Study One. Study Three further examined the reliability and validity of the scale within an organizational setting by testing a broader safety leadership commitment framework. Finally, Study Four investigated two key determinants of the safety leadership support behaviors (safety climate and safety initiativespecific knowledge) using a 3 x 2 experimental vignette design. This dissertation contributes to the understanding of how safety leadership commitment is behaviorally expressed, establishes a validated measure of safety leadership support behaviors and provides insight into how safety leadership commitment can be effectively fostered in the context of safety interventions.