Safety-specific transformational leadership, safety climate and occupational accidents

Abstract

Despite the fact that safety-specific transformational leadership had been reported to have favorable outcomes on workplace safety, there is limited work on identifying its role in decreasing occupational accidents at workplace. The current study looks to fill this void by proposing safety-specific leadership approach to combat occupational accidents via safety climate. Data were collected from 270 production workers of Oil and Gas Industry across four states of Malaysia. Results showed strong support for our suppositions. Safety climate mediated the relationship between safety-specific leadership and occupational accidents. The supposition linking safety-specific transformational leadership to safety climate and safety climate to occupational accidents also found considerable support. The results are discussed in the light of previous literature and the contributions made by the study.