| The general view in the field of safety is that employees' opinions and suggestions related to safety are of great importance for organizational growth and survival.Therefore,it is always a relatively popular research topic to study voice behaviors of organizational employees in safety management.Previous research suggests that an important reason for the occurrence of a safety accident is that employees are reluctant to express their ideas and suggestions for safety to the management authorities,so more research attention has been paid to the impact of leadership on employees' voice behaviors,especially two important categories of leadership styles named transformational leadership and transactional leadership;however,studies also show that the causes of safety accidents are often not employees' unwillingness to express,but rather difficulties in identifying the hidden safety problems that exist in the workplace.Hence,we believe that some limitations still exist in the current research regarding how leadership styles affect employees' voice behaviors.First,the individual should not only express views to the management,but also identify the problem in the process of voicing them.Unfortunately,most previous studies merely focused on either the safety voice or problem identification,without a holistic consideration of the two aspects above.Secondly,there are differences in the antecedent variables of individual problem identification and voice behavior,which demonstrates that the influence of leadership style on voice behavior shown in existing research is difficult to migrate directly to the study of problem identification.To sum up,we believe that it is difficult to apply traditional isolated research to solving the above problems;it is necessary to use an integrated perspective,which needs to consider problem recognition when studying the topic of safety voice.Further,this paper explores how the specific leadership style(transformational leadership and transactional leadership)impacts problem recognition,safety voice,and the relationship of problem recognition and safety voice.Based on the conservation of resource theory,transformational leadership can stimulate subordinates' concerns about safety improvement by giving much resources such as job support and work autonomy,which can further motivate employees to proactively identify more safety issues.For transactional leadership,however,it could lead to subordinates focusing on potential threats and penalties due to the lack of resources that leaders can provide,which could prompt employees to passively identify more safety issues.Moreover,the above two paths are affected by many contextual factors,such as safety climate and voice climate.To this end,we have carried out four studies to explore these issues.By comparing multiple cases,Study 1 explored the logical chain of safety voice in three enterprises:a construction site,a pumped-storage power station and a nuclear power plant.The results showed that the logical chain generated behind the employees' safety voice in the sample enterprise was highly consistent,though there were differences in the degree and cause of voice behavior;that is,it is significant to consider problem identification in studying safety voice integrally.First,employees needed to interpret workplace safety incidents to identify whether they were hidden safety issues.Second,individuals who had identified hidden safety issues needed to further interpret the interpersonal context in the workplace and further decide whether to express the safety issues.Additionally,the results also showed that the individuals had a certain degree of variance in their attributions of problem identification and safety voice.Therefore,Study 1 validated that it was reasonable and necessary to consider problem recognition and safety voice integrally.In Study 2,this research proposes and validates the different effects of transformational leadership and transactional leadership on problem recognition and safety voice.In particular,transformative and transactional leadership were positively related to problem identification,and transformational leadership was associated with the safety voice of subordinates,while transactional leadership was negatively related to the safety voice of subordinates.Furthermore,we explored the mechanisms of transformational and transactional leadership on problem recognition and safety voice,finding that transactional leadership influences problem recognition positively and safety voice negatively by triggering the prevention focus of employees,while transformational leadership influences problem recognition and safety voice positively through stimulating the promotion focus of employees.Drawing on conservation of resource theory,on the basis of Study 1 and Study 2,Study 3 explores situational factors influencing the effect of transformational leadership on problem recognition and safety voice through promotion focus,and influencing the effect of transactional leadership on problem recognition and safety voice through prevention focus.Specifically,the effects of transformational leadership and transactional leadership on problem recognition through regulatory focus were moderated by safety climate,and the effects of transformational leadership and transactional leadership on safety voice through regulatory focus were moderated by voice climate.The field study results subsequently show that the cross-level mediating effect of transactional leadership on safety voice through the triggering of subordinates' prevention focus is not supported,while the moderated mediation effect of safety climate and voice climate has been partially supported.According to three studies above explored the effects of mechanisms and situational factors of transformational and transactional leadership on problem recognition and safety voice,there is still not comprehensive logic behind problem recognition and safety voice,that is,how leadership styles affect the relationship of problem recognition and safety voice.Although the two leadership styles enhance employee problem recognition to a similar extent,Study 4 uses field research methods to explore why the two leadership styles have different effects on safety voice.The study proposes and verifies how the two leadership styles influence safety voice-that is,transformational leadership is positively associated with safety voice through triggering voice climate from the team's perspective,while transactional leadership weakens an employee's motivation by negatively influencing the voice climate.The contributions of this research are as follows:first,it provides a new perspective of voice through analysis of three cases and extending the previous theoretical research.Second,based on the safety voice process perspective,this research holistically explores the mechanism of transformational leadership and transactional leadership and its effect on the safety voice process,making up for the lack of isolated research on the relationship between problem recognition and safety voice.Third,by introducing conservation of resource theory,this research expands the theoretical framework in explaining the mechanism of leadership and how it affects an employee's safety performance.Last but not least,this research explores the situational factors and boundary conditions of transformational and transactional leadership through regulatory focus of subordinates,as well as enhancing the explanatory power of conservation of resource theory.Finally,implications for theory and future research are discussed. |
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