Research On The Effects Of Leadership On Safety Climate

Work accidents would cause human injuries and death, bring economic loss and social harm, and therefore it’s necessary and significant to study safety issues. Researches show that workers’unsafe behavior is the main reason leading to work accidents, and organizational safety climate can effectively promote safe work behavior and reduce accidents. Most previous studies of safety climate were concentrated in its impact on organizational safety results, while few studied the formation of safety climate.One researcher has proposed "leaders create climate", but little related empirical study has been conducted, and how leaders create climate remainsambiguious.. This study introduces regulatory focus theory, and employes regulatory focuses as mediators to explain how transformational leadership and transactional leadership affect climate. During the process of leaders’priming followers’situational regulatory focuses, the quality of leader-memebr exchange may facilitate or hinder it. In addition, different leadership styles and different regulatory focuses would have different impacts, so this study also introduces innovation climate as another indicator to distinguish with safety climate.Focusing on the above issues, the author designed a questionnaire and spread them to9manufacturing enterprises in Huzhou City and Taizhou City in Zhejiang Province.205pieces of valid questionnaires were finally collected. Then the author employed SPSS and LISREL to analyze the data to test the research hypotheses. The main conclusions of this study are:(1) In Chinese manufacturing enterprises, transformational leadership and management-by-exception leadership positively affect the organizational safety climate, and transformational leadership and contingent reward leadership positively affect organizational innovation climate;(2) both transformational leadership and contingent reward leadership would positively prime followers’promotion focus, and management-by-exception leadership would positively prime followers’ prevetion focus;(3) The relationship between transformational leadership and innovation climate, between contingent reward leadership and innovation climate are partially mediated by followers’primed promotion focus, and the relationship between management-by-exception leadership and safety climate is partially mediated by followers’primed prevetion focus;(4) The quality of leader-member exchange positively moderates the relationship between management-by-exception leadership and followers’primed prevention focus.Finally, this paper discusses the hypotheses testing results, and.points out its theoretical and practical implications. The disadvantages of the paper and trend of future research are also mentioned.