Involving Moral and Ethical Principles in Safety Management Systems

The Nexus Between Ethical Leadership and Employees' Perception of Workplace Safety During COVID-19 Under Mediation and Moderation Model

Background

Workplace safety is a crucial aspect of employee well-being and organizational success, with ethical leadership playing a key role in shaping employees' perceptions of safety. Today, the underlying mechanisms through which ethical leadership influences workplace safety perception remain underexplored, especially in the Pakistan healthcare industry. Based on the social cognitive theory, this study aims to investigate the relationship between ethical leadership and workplace safety perception and examine the mediating role of media quality, communication climate, and supervisory communication and the moderating role of moral attentiveness.

Methods

An empirical survey method was used to conduct the quantitative study, with respondents representing nursing staff from hospitals in Pakistan. Data was collected using an online questionnaire during COVID-19, and Smart PLS was used to analyze the data.

Results

The study demonstrated that ethical leadership positively and significantly affects workplace safety perception. Media quality, communication climate, and supervisory communication mediate between ethical leadership and workplace safety perception. Moral attentiveness moderates the relationship between ethical leadership and workplace safety perception.

Conclusion

Ethical leadership is an essential tool that improves media quality, communication climate, supervisory communication, and moral attentiveness. The article presents a novel approach to examining the relationship between ethical leadership and workers' safety perceptions under the influence of mediating and moderating variables. By better understanding these dynamics, the study contributes to developing organizational strategies to improve workplace safety and overall employee well-being. In addition, it is a pioneering study exploring ethical leadership's role in influencing workers' perceptions of safety. Overall, the study is a great initiative that fosters the ethical concepts of individuals, thus achieving health protection and safety.

The "Transparency for Safety" Triangle: Developing a Smart Transparency Framework to Achieve a Safety Learning Community

Transparency about health and safety risks is a complex societal, moral, ethical and political concept. Full transparency does not come natural for any of the key stakeholder groups: organizations, authorities and the people. If safety information is not sufficiently shared between them, people and the environment can be harmed. The authors explored the literature on transparency in sharing health and safety information. The findings show that such transparency as a subject is abundant in the literature but the exchange of information is far from complete in practice. Health and safety information is shared both via internal flows within each stakeholder group and via external flows between them. All three main stakeholders in pursuit of true safety for their own reasons, building trust via sharing of health and safety information, require improvement in transparency and a safety information broker between them. This constitutes a smart transparency and information exchange framework. The authors recommend developing a transparency standard, to study cyber-socio-technical systems safety and to include currently underutilized experiential knowledge available from the general public in the societal discourse. The authors propose a societal domain extension to a holistic safety culture model in support of a learning safety community.