With workplace fatalities and injuries on the rise, research on safety leadership has also grown, given the critical role it has been shown to play in enhancing safety performance. Historically, much of this research is grounded in transformational leadership, which has been widely used as a framework for understanding and operationalizing safety leadership. However, to date, no concrete definition of safety leadership has been developed. The present study aimed to explore and formulate a conceptual definition of safety leadership as well as the key characteristics of effective safety leaders.
To investigate this topic, a systematic literature review was conducted to synthesize existing literature on the empirical definition of safety leadership. Despite its frequent use in both academia and industry, the review confirmed earlier claims that no consensus exists on what safety leadership actually means. The review identified seven empirical definitions of safety leadership; six were extrapolated from their corresponding operational definitions (i.e. how to measure safety leadership), while one was derived through qualitative means. While the latter represents the first empirically grounded conceptual definition, its methodology presents limitations, particularly regarding data source triangulation.
The present study aimed to address these limitations by adopting a qualitative exploratory research approach. Twenty-five semi-structured interviews were conducted to address two key questions: how senior leaders in high-risk industries define safety leadership and what qualities or traits characterize safety leaders. Efforts were made to recruit interviewees from different organizations, industries, and geographies to ensure a broad range of perspectives, and inductive thematic analysis was employed to analyze the data and address the research questions.
The thematic analysis identified eight overarching themes within the data: five addressing the definition of safety leadership and three highlighting the key characteristics of effective safety leaders. Safety leadership was found to be a leadership style where authentic care is demonstrated through leaders who embody and drive safety as a core value by strategically prioritizing it in their communications, decisions and actions to improve safety and business performance. Safety leaders were characterized by their trustworthiness, positive influence on others, and promotion of psychological safety.
Despite having parallels with other leadership styles, safety leadership was found to be conceptually unique and independent from other forms of leadership constructs. This finding challenges the prevailing view in the academic literature, which has long associated safety leadership with transformational leadership. Additionally, while safety leadership has traditionally been linked solely to safety performance, the present study unveils its positive impact on business performance as well.
These findings offer significant contributions to both safety science and practice, with implications discussed alongside recommendations for future research and an analysis of the study's strengths and limitations.