Authentic leadership and its relationship with risk perception and safety climate

Reviewing the influence of positive leadership on worker well-being: A comprehensive analysis

The study provides a review of existing empirical studies on the impact of positive leadership on worker well-being. The aim it to integrate current knowledge and provide directions for future research. The study analyses the content of 118 articles retrieved mainly from Google Scholar and Scopus database published between 2004 and 2022. Findings revealed that most of the studies are atheoretical with the dominant theory applied being conservation of resource theory. Furthermore, most of the studies were cross-sectionally designed, used convenient sampling and self-reported questionnaire. A conceptual framework is presented which synthesizes findings from prior works and shows the various dimensions of positive leadership practices and worker well-being. Additionally, a comprehensive future research agenda for theoretical and empirical advancement is suggested. The study offers a comprehensive framework that synthesizes and integrates the existing literature on positive leadership and worker well-being. The findings offer researchers in leadership a common platform for discourse.

The role of risk preferences: voluntary health insurance in rural Tanzania

BACKGROUND

Lower-middle-income countries (LMICs) have a common goal to achieve universal health coverage (UHC) through voluntary health insurance schemes. This is important to improve access to healthcare services and ensure financial protection for all by reducing out-of-pocket expenditures. This study aimed to examine the role of risk preferences on enrollment status (currently insured, previously insured, and never insured) into a Tanzanian voluntary health insurance scheme targeted at the informal sector.

METHODS

Data were collected from households in a random sample of 722 respondents. The risk preference measure was based on a hypothetical lottery game which applies the BJKS instrument. This instrument measures income risk where the respondents are to choose between a certain income and a lottery. Both multinomial and simple logistic regression models have been used to analyze the relationship between risk aversion and enrollment status.

RESULTS

On average, the respondents have a high degree of risk aversion, and the insured are more risk averse than the uninsured (previously insured and never insured). There is a weak tendency for the wealthiest, measured by household income or total household expenditure, to be somewhat more risk averse than the less wealthy. Logistic and multinomial logistic regressions show that risk aversion is strongly associated with enrollment status. A higher degree of risk aversion significantly increases the probability of being insured, relative to being previously insured, and relative to being never insured.

CONCLUSION

Risk aversion matters in a decision to enroll into the iCHF scheme. Strengthening the benefit package for the scheme, might increase the enrollment rate and hence improve access to healthcare services for people in rural areas and those employed in the informal sector.

The role of HEXACO in the development of authentic leadership and its consequences on task performance

Purpose

The objectives of the current study were to identify the antecedents and outcomes of authentic leadership. For antecedents, the research considered the HEXACO (Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, eXtraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience) personality model and thereby identified the impact of authentic leadership on employee performance with the mediating role of psychological safety and employee engagement by using the trait theory.

Design/methodology/approach

The current study adopted a positivism research philosophy followed by a deductive approach. Overall, 347 samples were collected from the public sector organizations using quantitative research techniques, and data were gathered through a self-administrated questionnaire. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used through structural equation modeling (SEM)-Mplus to generate the results and test the formulated hypotheses.

Findings

The results revealed that honesty-humility significantly impacts authentic leadership (β = 0.094 and p < 0.05). Similarly, other dimensions of HEXACO also play a significant role in forming authentic leadership. After analyzing the HEXACO as the antecedent of authentic leadership, sequential mediation of psychological safety and employee engagement was checked and identified that authentic leadership in the presence of mediators was insignificant. Hence the full mediation has been recorded.

Originality/value

Since its inception, a plethora of research has been available on the authentic leadership theory. However, the empirical evidence revealed that most research is related to outcomes of authentic leadership. As far as antecedents of authentic leadership are concerned, the literature is still silent, specifically on the development of authentic leaders. The current study is significantly contributing to the theory of authentic leadership, and in this context, the study is unique since it is taking the HEXACO personality model as an antecedent of authentic leadership to investigate its role in the development of authentic leaders. Moreover, the study is also identified as the impact of authentic leadership on task performance, not in isolation, but by taking psychological safety and employee engagement as a mediating mechanism.

Authentic leadership, perceived insider status, error management climate, and employee resilience: A cross-level study

Employee resilience is of great significance for organizations to resist pressures, overcome crises, and achieve sustainable development. However, existing research has largely failed to explore its situational triggers. Drawing on social information processing theory and social exchange theory, a cross-level study was conducted to theorize the underlying mechanisms through which authentic leadership facilitates employee resilience. Based on a two-wave time-lagged design, the data were obtained from 85 team leaders and 417 employees in China. The results of the cross-level model showed that authentic leadership was positively related to employee resilience. Perceived insider status and error management climate both played a partial mediating role in linking authentic leadership and employee resilience. Error management climate positively moderated the relationship between perceived insider status and employee resilience. This paper not only contributes to revealing the cross-level effect of authentic leadership on employee resilience but also provides some managerial practices.

Leadership and risk: a review of the literature

Purpose

Even though every decision a leader makes carries an element of risk, no review on the topic of leadership and risk has appeared in highly-ranked management journals in the past 20 years. This is in contrast to the discipline of psychology in which leadership and risk receives considerable attention, particularly in the field of heroism studies. In the context of the established body of research on the topic of leadership and risk in the discipline of psychology, this review therefore explores the research on leadership and risk in highly-ranked management studies’ journals.

Design/methodology/approach

The review was conducted in five stages. During phase 1, journal rankings were used as basis to determine which highly-ranked journals to include in the review. Phase 2 focused on identifying all relevant articles in the journals included in our review. We searched for articles published from 2000 to 2021 with the words “risk” or “danger” and “leader” or “leadership” in their abstracts. In phase 3, the author analysed the abstracts of the articles in depth to determine whether the keywords were included on the basis of an explicit scholarly reflection or research on leadership and risk. Phase 4 focused on analysing articles' treatment of leadership and risk, and assigning key words and key phrases. Finally, during phase 5 key words and key phrases were clustered together thematically.

Findings

This study analysis yielded six thematic clusters. The first two clusters – on risk appetite of followers and leaders – are closely related. In total, 12 journal articles explored these themes. The remaining thematic clusters contain four and seven articles each. These clusters are risk, creativity and innovation; risk and failure; risk in dangerous contexts; and risk and gender. Nine of the selected articles did not fit in any of the thematic clusters.

Originality/value

The review reveals a significant lack of research on leadership and risk in highly-ranked management studies’ journals. The author found that the topic of leadership and risk is approached in a binary fashion: successful leaders are viewed as using risk to drive innovation and unsuccessful leaders fail because of risk. The author argues that the heroic bias in leadership research could be partly blamed for this binarism. In practical terms, the author highlights that the growing importance of chief risk officers – leaders appointed to deal with company risk – indicates a clear need for research on leadership and risk in general management studies’ journals.

What Drives Employees' Innovative Behaviors in Emerging-Market Multinationals? An Integrated Approach

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has severely damaged the global industrial supply chain and accelerated the digital transformation of the global economy. In such rapidly changing environments, multinational corporations (MNCs) should encourage employees to be more innovative in various fields than ever before. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, employees have become psychologically anxious, their working conditions have deteriorated, and they are in danger of losing their jobs. In this study, we aim to address the question of whether servant leadership facilitates the innovative behavior of employees working in emerging-market MNCs when servant leadership is adopted within the firms. In addition, we explore the mediating roles of work-life balance and psychological stability perceived by employees, and the moderating role of organizational climate in the relationship between servant leadership and MNC employees' innovative behavior. In doing so, we collected data from a sample of 307 Chinese employees who are employed by five different Chinese MNCs from the Internet, information technology, electronics, and e-commerce industries. Based on a sample of survey data collected from employees of Chinese MNCs, we empirically test these ideas by specifically examining how servant leadership may shape the innovation behavior of employees in these MNCs. The results suggest that servant leadership positively influences employees' innovative behavior, and that the contribution of servant leadership to employees' innovative behavior is mediated by work-life balance and psychological stability as well as moderated by the degree of organizational climate. Moreover, the different organizational climates of these MNC employees are also expected to significantly shape the relationship between servant leadership and employees' innovative behavior. This study enriches our understanding of the importance of servant leadership in driving the innovative behaviors of employees in emerging-market MNCs and provides new insights into the mechanisms through which emerging-market MNCs can motivate their employees to be more innovative in their jobs. Thus, this study contributes to the research on human resource management by offering important implications vis-à-vis how MNCs manage their employees more effectively in addressing and responding to the dramatically changing global landscape in the post COVID-19 era.

Measuring Safety Climate in the Construction Industry: A Systematic Literature Review

Recent studies on safety in various fields use the concept of safety climate to explain the causes of safety accidents. Many studies attempt to measure the safety climates and identify the causes for accidents in the high-risk construction industry. Studies have shown that the higher the level of the safety climate, the lower the accident rate at construction sites. Methods of measuring safety climate, including the NOSACQ-50 survey, have been presented. Studies on the methodology of measuring safety climate should be continued to improve reliability and precision. Although many studies have been conducted to measure safety climate, such as questionnaires, regression analysis, and suggestions for safety climate measurement methods, there are few studies on a systematic literature review of them. This requires a systematic literature review (SLR) of the studies conducted so far. This study conducted an SLR on the definition and measurement methods of safety climate in the construction industry published since 2000, when safety climate’s impact on accidents began to be established. This review study utilized the PRISMA method, analyzed 735 studies, and selected 57 papers finally. SLR was carried out for selected research works, and the results were summarized. There are three methods to measure safety climate: literature survey, questionnaire, and data analysis. Factor analysis, development of measuring model, development of questionnaire, statistical analysis, and machine learning were investigated as their sub-methods. This study’s results can be used as fundamental sources for improving existing methods and developing new methods of measuring safety climate in the construction industry.

Managing care errors in the wards

Purpose

The importance of an error management culture (EMC) that integrates error prevention with error management after errors occur has been highlighted in the existing literature. However, few empirical studies currently support the relationship between EMC and errors, while the factors that affect EMC remain underexplored. Drawing on the conceptualisation of organisational cultures, the purpose of this paper is to verify the contribution of authentic leadership in steering EMC, thereby leading to reduced errors.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors conducted a cross-sectional survey study. The sample included 280 nurses.

Findings

Results of a full structural equation model supported the hypothesised model, showing that authentic leadership is positively associated with EMC, which in turn is negatively associated with the frequency of errors.

Practical implications

These results provide initial evidence for the role of authentic leadership in enhancing EMC and consequently, fostering error reduction in the workplace. The tested model suggests that the adoption of an authentic style can promote policies and practices to proactively manage errors, paving the way to error reduction in the workplace.

Originality/value

This study was one of the first to investigate the relationship between authentic leadership, error culture and errors. Further, it contributes to the existing literature by demonstrating both the importance of cultural orientation in protecting the organisation from error occurrence and the key role of authentic leaders in creating an environment for EMC development, thus permitting the organisation to learn from errors and reduce their negative consequences.

Reducing workplace accidents through the use of leadership interventions: A quasi-experimental field study

There is increasing evidence to suggest that leaders need to use a combination of leader behaviors to successfully improve safety, including both transformational and transactional styles, but there has been limited testing of this idea. We developed a leadership intervention, based on supervisor training in both transformational and active transactional behaviors, and implemented it with supervisors at a UK-based chemical processing company. The study found that the supervisory training intervention led to significant improvements in perceived employee safety climate, over an eight-week period, relative to the comparison group. Although we found no change in the frequency of leader behaviors, the intervention was effective in helping supervisors to apply active transactional leader behaviors in a safety-critical context. The results indicated that transformational leader behaviors were already at a high level and effectively linked to safety. Our findings suggest not only that employees may be receptive to safety-related active transactional behaviors within high-risk situations, but furthermore, leaders can be trained to adjust their behaviors to focus more on active transactional behaviors in safety-critical contexts.

Humble Leadership, Psychological Safety, Knowledge Sharing, and Follower Creativity: A Cross-Level Investigation

The leadership literature has provided growing evidence regarding the power of leadership in facilitating follower creativity. Despite these advances, a noticeable omission in this body of research is humble leadership. The study extends previous research by developing a cross-level moderated mediation model and examining the roles that psychological safety and knowledge sharing may play in the relationship between humble leadership and follower creativity. Using a time-lagged data of 328 team members nested within 106 teams, the results show that: (a) psychological safety mediates the relationship between humble leadership and follower creativity; (b) knowledge sharing moderates the relationship between psychological safety and follower creativity; and (c) the indirect influence of humble leadership on follower creativity through psychological safety is stronger when knowledge sharing is high.

Ending on a positive: Examining the role of safety leadership decisions, behaviours and actions in a safety critical situation

Safety leadership is an important factor in supporting safe performance in the workplace. The present case study examined the role of safety leadership during the Bingham Canyon Mine high-wall failure, a significant mining incident in which no fatalities or injuries were incurred. The Critical Decision Method (CDM) was used in conjunction with a self-reporting approach to examine safety leadership in terms of decisions, behaviours and actions that contributed to the incidents' safe outcome. Mapping the analysis onto Rasmussen's Risk Management Framework (Rasmussen, 1997), the findings demonstrate clear links between safety leadership decisions, and emergent behaviours and actions across the work system. Communication and engagement based decisions featured most prominently, and were linked to different leadership practices across the work system. Further, a core sub-set of CDM decision elements were linked to the open flow and exchange of information across the work system, which was critical to supporting the safe outcome. The findings provide practical implications for the development of safety leadership capability to support safety within the mining industry.

Safety leadership and systems thinking: application and evaluation of a Risk Management Framework in the mining industry

Safety leadership is an important factor in supporting safety in high-risk industries. This article contends that applying systems-thinking methods to examine safety leadership can support improved learning from incidents. A case study analysis was undertaken of a large-scale mining landslide incident in which no injuries or fatalities were incurred. A multi-method approach was adopted, in which the Critical Decision Method, Rasmussen's Risk Management Framework and Accimap method were applied to examine the safety leadership decisions and actions which enabled the safe outcome. The approach enabled Rasmussen's predictions regarding safety and performance to be examined in the safety leadership context, with findings demonstrating the distribution of safety leadership across leader and system levels, and the presence of vertical integration as key to supporting the successful safety outcome. In doing so, the findings also demonstrate the usefulness of applying systems-thinking methods to examine and learn from incidents in terms of what 'went right'. The implications, including future research directions, are discussed. Practitioner Summary: This paper presents a case study analysis, in which systems-thinking methods are applied to the examination of safety leadership decisions and actions during a large-scale mining landslide incident. The findings establish safety leadership as a systems phenomenon, and furthermore, demonstrate the usefulness of applying systems-thinking methods to learn from incidents in terms of what 'went right'. Implications, including future research directions, are discussed.

Authentic leadership and team climate: testing cross-lagged relationships

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between authentic leadership and team climate across 22 months. More specifically, three alternative causation models (normal, reversed, reciprocal) were tested.

Design/methodology/approach

– The longitudinal study was conducted among 265 Finnish municipal employees (87.5 per cent women, mean age 48.4 years). The participants completed a questionnaire three times: at baseline (T1), about 14 months after baseline (T2) and about eight months after the second questionnaire (T3).

Findings

– The cross-lagged analyses based on structural equation modelling lent support to the reversed causation model more than the normal causation and reciprocal models. More specifically, team climate at T2 predicted authentic leadership across eight months at T3. Thus the study suggests that positive team climate (i.e. vision, participation safety, task orientation, and support for innovation) may foster authentic leadership in the long term and not vice versa.

Practical/implications

– The findings suggest that − besides improving team climate and authentic leadership themselves – team climate should be improved in order to enable authentic leadership to develop and flourish. It is important to emphasize that in forming the team climate employees are active agents and not passive targets.

Originality/value

– The study is among the first to test different causal models regarding authentic leadership and team climate. From the theoretical viewpoint, the findings suggest that follower-centric theories of leadership merit greater attention in the future.

Modeling Team Performance

Drawing on social identity theory and conflict theory, this study develops a research model that explains the development of team performance. In the model, team performance is indirectly related to authentic leadership and empathy via the full mediation of team identity and relationship conflict. Meanwhile, the positive relationship between team identity and team performance and the negative relationship between relationship conflict and team performance are hypothetically moderated by passion. Empirical testing of this model, by investigating team personnel from high-tech firms, confirms the integrative applicability of social identity theory and conflict theory for improving team performance. Last, the managerial implications and limitations of this study based on its empirical findings are provided.