Accident prevention is an important research field of disaster management and an important means to improve the level of emergency management. In recent years, frequent accidents has caused serious consequences, posting a great threat to the life and health of the millions of workers, whose key cause is front-line workers’unsafe behavior. Therefore, safety antecedents at organizational and behavioral levels need to be explored in complex production organization environments, thus ensuring that safety management directives and orders are communicated sufficiently and effectively to the frontline workers. Leadership is one of the most important and widely studied areas of research. However, the formal leadership of senior management is limited by the attenuation of the effect of organizational hierarchy, so that the safety instructions cannot be normally transmitted to the frontline workers, which cannot also be properly implemented by the frontline workers, resulting in the failure of effective control of safety accidents.
In view of this, their paper proposes a scientific construct of "informal safety leadership" based on the interaction among frontline workers, and introduces the perspectives of social cognition and interaction to describe its emergence mechanism among frontline workers. A three-wave multi-sample field study and an agent-based modeling simulation experiment also show the process of the emergence and consolidation of informal safety leadership.
1.The Advantage Of Informal Safety Leadership
Informal safety leadership refers to the emergent leadership of ordinary organizational members in influencing safety-related attitudes,behaviors, and mindsets to achieve organizational safety goals via social interactions with colleagues.
Compared with formal safety leadership, the biggest advantage of informal safety leadership is that it does not need to go through the top-down organizational level, but directly acts on the frontline workers, so the problem of progressive attenuation of safety instructions can be effectively avoided. At the production site, when informal safety leadership is constantly emerging and emerging to a certain level, under the influence of informal safety leaders, other frontline workers will follow them, so that the overall safety participation of the operation site is improved, and safety management becomes more comprehensive and targeted.
2.The Emergence Of Informal Safety Leadership: A Social Cognitive Process
Their paper applies social cognitive to depict the mechanisms involved in the informal safety leadership emergence process, which contains two processes. The first phase is initial emergence, in which frontline workers generate basic safety leadership attributes, driven by key social-cognitive factors such as attitude, self-efficacy, and competence. The second phase is consolidation, in which the informal leaders makeinformal safety leadership more explicit and visible by exhibiting safety organizational citizenship behavior, and induce followership among their coworkers so as to consolidateinformal safety leadership emergence bycontinuous leader-follower cognition and interactions. Only through the continuous social cognition and interaction caninformal safety leadership emerge and be consolidated.
Based on systematic literature research, their paper developed a moderated mediation model to explore the emergence mechanism of informal safety leadership from the perspective of social cognition, and scientifically verified it through two methods consisting of a three-wave empirical research andan agent-based modeling simulation experiment. They found that safety attitude, safety competence and self-efficacy are positively correlated with the emergence of informal safety leadership, and can further promote thesafety organizationalcitizenship behavior and the followership of followers. Safety attitude reflects employee cognition, awareness, beliefs, and feelings about safety policies and measures. Safety competence is a person’s basic characteristic that is causally related to good or excellent performance in safety.Selfefficacy can be generally defined as a comprehensive judgment about one’s capability to mobilize motivation, cognitive resources, and courses of action necessary to perform a certain task. safety organizationalcitizenship behavior is voluntary assistance to other organizational members to improve safety. Followership is the intentional practice by the follower to enhance the synergetic interchange between the follower and the leader.At the same time, formalsafety leadership also plays an important regulating role, that is, the emergence of informal security leadership also depends on the support and help of formal leaders.
By exploring the emergence process and mechanism of the above informal leadership at the operation site, it can provide scientific reference for explaining how workers and other frontline personnel master safety leadership, and promote innovative research on disaster management and accident prevention at the organizational level. In the process of production operation,theinterpersonal relationships, social interaction and mutual understanding of organization members, can make thecolleagues whohave potentialleadership traitssignificantly influenceother individuals. After that, the cognitive style of colleagues are changed and their behavior patternsare optimized. At the same time,the workers who have potential leadership traits canconsolidate and enhance their own leadership, so as to promote the overall cognition and behavior model significantly. This process does not involve the transmission of administrative instructions and mandatory rules, butitis based on the social cognition and interaction network offrontline workers. Therefore, it is one of the most convenient, effective and direct ways toincubate workers' safe behavior through the cultivation of informal leadership.
About the Author
Dr. Chunlin Wu is an associate professor of the School of Economics and Management, Beihang University. He received his PhD from Tsinghua University. His research interests include organizational behavior and culture, knowledge sharing and corporate innovation, andenterprise digital transformation, etc. He has published in leading international journals, such as Production and Operations Management, Accident Analysis and Prevention, International Journal of Project Management, Automation in Construction, Journal of Management in Engineering, etc.
