Nip it in the bud: the role of vigilant leadership, knowledge sharing, and safety performance

Abstract

Maintaining vigilance is critical for High-speed railway (HSR) in a fickle environment of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. A new vigilant leadership style was introduced into HSR literature, which directs employees to focus on, search for, and respond to potential future threats. This study constructs a research model to examine the effect of vigilant leadership on safety performance from a social information processing perspective, with individual mindfulness as boundary condition and knowledge sharing as a mediator. We adopted a time-lagged study with 961 samples and 137 workgroups collected from Chinese Railway Bureau over 3 months. The findings state that vigilant leadership is associated with employees’ safety performance by enhancing knowledge sharing. Employee’s mindfulness moderates the indirect effect of vigilant leadership on safety performance through knowledge sharing. The indirect effect is more positive when an employee’s mindfulness is high than when it is low. This research first introduces vigilant leadership to the Chinese HSR, which provides implications for raising the safety performance and long-term development of HSR organizations, and also benefits the HSR employees’ occupational health and safety.