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Project

Leadership and Safety Behavior in Air Traffic Control and Beyond

Safety behavior is critical in air traffic control (ATC) and other high-risk environments due to the far-reaching risks a lack of safety behavior entails in terms of physical harm, social, and economic consequences. The literature shows that one of the main antecedents of safety behavior is leadership. Yet, little research on the relationship between leadership and safety behavior has been conducted in ATC. The first aim of this dissertation is to examine this relationship. For that purpose, in a first study, diary study data were obtained from employees in ATC. Supervisors’ servant leadership, support for safety, and leader-member exchange did not show a relationship with employees’ safety compliance or safety citizenship behavior, reflecting respectively safety behavior that is prescribed by the job and safety behavior that facilitates a safety-supportive environment without being prescribed by the job. Moreover, unexpectedly a negative relationship between supervisors’ trustworthiness and employees’ safety citizenship behavior was found. The results suggest that in the ATC context different processes may be of importance than in other industries, or that the right conditions may need to be created for ATC supervisors’ leadership to relate to employees’ safety behavior. Moreover, the study emphasizes the need for leaders to take up the “leader role”, as opposed to being primarily focused on administrative processes, in order to see relevant outcomes of leadership.

A second study examined the relationship between transformational and transactional leadership on the one hand and employees’ cognitive task performance on the other hand. Cognitive task performance is important for safety performance in ATC, but also more generally for employees’ job performance. This study applied and tested the conservation of resources (COR) theory of Hobfoll (1989) regarding cognitive resources with data from employees who filled in a survey and performed cognitive tasks. The results indicate that the relationship between leadership and employees’ cognitive task performance may be negligible and unexplainable by COR theory.

A third study explored the role of situational factors in determining safety compliance and safety performance, as situational factors may well play a significant role in spite of being widely neglected in the safety literature. Drawing on bounded ethicality research, cognitive load and perceived responsibility for safety (as situational factors) were expected to influence individuals’ safety compliance and performance. Moreover, the moderating role of individuals’ personality was investigated. Based on experimental data, no evidence was found for the hypothesized main and interaction effects of the situational factors, yet evidence for a moderating role of personality was found. This implies that depending on individuals’ personality, situational factors may need to be considered to increase safety compliance and performance. Overall, this dissertation highlights the importance of context with regards to safety behavior and its relationship with leadership.

Date:11 Sep 2017 →  11 May 2021
Keywords:safety behavior, high-risk environment, air traffic control, leadership, cognitive resources, situational factors
Disciplines:Applied psychology
Project type:PhD project