The role of safety training and safety leadership in determining safety organisational citizenship behaviours

Safety in the workplace is an important topic that needs to be addressed in order to create safer and healthier workplaces. Currently there has been an increase of papers investigating safety employing organisational psychology models, such as the Job Demands-Resource model, which has been used by many Occupational Health and Safety/Workplace Health & Safety regulators and government agencies around the world (Bakker and Demerouti, 2017). Using this model and specifically, the motivational hypothesis, it has been hypothesized that job resources such as safety training in the workplace and safety leadership styles of the supervisor could be related to work engagement of the workers and consequently safety organisational citizenship behaviours (SOCBs). Furthermore, in order to fill in the gap in literature on the outcomes of different types of safety leadership styles, this study aims to analyse potential differential effects of safety transformational leadership style and passive leadership style in determining safety outcomes such as SOCBs. In order to test these hypotheses, a study has been conducted on a site of a chemical multinational corporation in the northern part of Italy. The participants of the cross-sectional study were 60 workers, of which 69.6% were less than 50 years old. Almost half of them (53.3%) had the role of safety supervisor or safety manager. Furthermore, 40% belonged to safety emergency teams. Results of the study showed that work engagement fully mediated the relationship between safety training, safety transformational leadership and safety passive leadership and SOCBs. In other words, findings showed that safety training and transformational leadership were related to higher levels of work engagement, which in turn was related to higher levels of SOCBs. On the other hand, we found that passive safety leadership style was related to lower levels of work engagement and consequently lower levels of SOCBs. This study enhances the knowledge concerning the role played by safety training and safety leadership styles in order to determine SOCBs, which in turn could be related to lower levels of injuries and accidents in the workplace and higher levels of health and safety in companies.