Initiating a safety oriented change—or safety initiative—is conceptually distinct from other forms of safety participation and safety citizenship behaviour, yet little attention has been given to its performance outcomes or its motivational antecedents. An initial study with a sample composed of middle managers (N = 86) showed that safety initiative predicted objective improvement actions 6 months later, whereas, showing differential validity, safety compliance predicted the implementation of monitoring actions. Two subsequent studies focused on motivational antecedents. First, using a sample of team leaders (N = 295), we tested a higher-order structure of proactive motivation that incorporates three domains: “can do”, “reason to” and future orientation. Second, in a longitudinal study of chemical work operators (N = 188), after checking for the influence of potential confounders (past behaviours; accidents experience; perceived risk), we showed that safety initiative was predicted only by proactive motivation. Instead, safety compliance was found to be associated with affective commitment and scrupulousness, whereas safety helping was found to be associated with affective commitment. Self-reported behaviours were validated against rater assessments. This study supports the importance of distinguishing safety initiative from other safety behaviours, indicating how to create an organizational context supporting a proactive management of workplace safety.

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.

In this study, we test whether different types of safety leadership styles predict different employees’ change-oriented discretionary communications about safety (i.e., safety voice) after controlling for proactive personality disposition to improve organizational sustainability. Building upon a multidimensional model of safety voice, which attempts to conceptualize different ways in which employees make suggestions about safety procedures, we developed four realistic scenarios in which we manipulated the supervisor’s safety leadership style, including: (1) transformational safety leadership, (2) transactional safety leadership, (3) passive safety leadership, and (4) control group (i.e., no leadership at all). We randomly assigned 103 participants to two of four scenarios and measured four facets of safety voice and proactive personality dispositions. The findings showed that after controlling for the respondents’ proactive personality, transformative safety leadership predicted promotive safety voice, transactional safety leadership predicted preventive safety voice, and passive safety leadership predicted hostile safety voice. These findings have a number of implications for our understanding of safety leadership and employees’ safety communications.