Upward Voice: Participative Decision Making, Trust in Leadership and Safety Climate Matter

How Safety Climate Impacts Safety Voice-Investigating the Mediating Role of Psychological Safety from a Social Cognitive Perspective

Safety voice has become a popular research topic in the organizational safety field because it helps to prevent accidents. A good safety climate and psychological safety can motivate employees to actively express their ideas about safety, but the specific mechanisms of safety climate and psychological safety, on safety voice, are not yet clear. Based on the "environment-subject cognition-behavior" triadic interaction model of social cognitive theory, this paper explores the relationship between safety climate and safety voice, and the mediating role of psychological safety. We collected questionnaires and conducted data analysis of the valid questionnaires using analytical methods such as hierarchical regression, stepwise regression, and the bootstrap sampling method. We found that safety climate significantly and positively influenced safety voice, and psychological safety played a mediating role between safety climate and safety voice, which strengthened the positive relationship between them. From the research results, it was clear that to stimulate employees to express safety voice behavior, organizations should strive to create a good safety climate and pay attention to building employees' psychological safety. The findings of this paper provide useful insights for the management of employee safety voice behavior in enterprises.

When and for Whom Organizational Identification is More Effective in Eliciting Safety Voice: An Empirical Study from Construction Industry Perspective

Safety voice (SV) is a form of voice in which employees express opinions or concerns about organizational safety. It plays an important role in preventing accidents and promoting safety performance. The purpose of this study is to reveal the emotional factors and boundary conditions behind employee engagement in SV, especially in the construction context. This study, therefore, investigated how organizational identification (OID) drove construction project participants' SV using a three-way interaction model of perceived insider status (PIS) as an individual difference and safety climate (SC) as an organizational contextual difference. The proposed model was tested using a sample of 357 participants in different construction projects. The results showed that OID was positively correlated with SV. The interaction effect of OID and PIS on SV depended on the SC, with PIS enhancing the identification-voice relationship at a low level of SC and weakening it at a high level of SC.

The Effect of Food Sustainability and the Food Safety Climate on the Job Stress, Job Satisfaction and Job Commitment of Kitchen Staff

Background: The food safety climate within an organization represents the job environment that affects the safe management of food and reveals the characteristics of employees. This study aimed to help establish a food safety climate in hotel kitchens that would reduce job stress and increase job satisfaction and employee engagement. Methods: This study was conducted with 570 chefs in 12 five-star hotels in South Korea using a questionnaire-based survey. A total of 570 questionnaires were distributed; 504 usable responses were used in the empirical analysis. Results: The results of this study are summarized as follows. First, among the food safety climate factors perceived by hotel chefs, leadership, resources and communication affect job stress. Second, all five factors of the food safety climate affect the job satisfaction of hotel chefs. Among these factors, leadership, responsibility and communication have positive effects on job satisfaction, while risk awareness and resources have negative effects. Third, the leadership and resources of the food safety climate have positive effects on job commitment. (4) Conclusions: This study has useful recommendations for the service industry, especially the hotel industry, for better human resource management, emphasizing food sustainability in kitchen staff job performance enhancement.

Speaking Up about Workplace Safety: An Experimental Study on Safety Leadership

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.