The Relationship between Leader-member exchange and Different Perceptions on Safety Climate in the Work Group

From the end of nineties leader – member exchange theory has been considered one of the most useful approaches for studying links between leadership and organizational outcomes and particularly with safety outcomes (Zohar, 2002; Hofmann and Morgenson, 1999). The studies of Zohar and Hofmann & Morgenson suggested to integrate leadership, and in particular leader – member exchange, and safety climate (SC) as crucial factors of occupational safety. In this study leadership style is connected with the organizational-level safety climate (OSC), i.e. shared perceptions about management priorities about safety, and with group-level safety climate, considering group’s supervisor as a climate agent (supervisor safety climate, SSC), i.e. shared perceptions about supervisor’s priorities about safety. OSC and SSC are considered from two different points of view: supervisor’s perceptions, and his/her group members’ perceptions. Agreement degree about level of OSC/SSC perceived from group members and level of OSC/SSC perceived from supervisor (i.e. his/her psychological OSC, and self-evaluation of his/her safety commitment in the case of SSC) depends on LMX level, and can mediate the effect of LMX level on safety behaviours. The aim of the present work is to study the relationship between LMX level and safety behaviours, specifically safety compliance, and the mediation role of agreement degree about OSC/SSC among supervisor and his/her group members. Data collection involved 508 blue-collars belonging to 3 Italian manufacturing companies. Safety climate was measured at the organizational level (OSC) and at the group level (SSC). The same measures were gathered also on their supervisors (22 team managers). The agreement degree was computed as the difference between supervisors' and their workers' scores. Results confirmed the hypothesis of the relationship between LMX scores and safety compliance: the higher the LMX scores, the higher the safety compliance. Furthermore, the mediation role of agreement degree has been verified showing a total mediation. This means that the impact of LMX on safety compliance depends on the distance between supervisor's and his/her members’ perceptions about the real importance of safety, at the organizational and at the group level. An important implication of this result is that organizations should develop effective exchange relationships between supervisor and work group, to improve safety at work.