Safety Climate and Safety Behavior in A Hotel : Focusing on the Moderating Effect of Safety Leadership

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of the hotel safety climate on the safety behavior of hotel workers, the mediating role of safety motivation, and the moderating role of safety leadership. Five hotels in China were targeted, and to prevent common method bias, the questionnaire was conducted three times with a time lag, and a total of 512 valid data were obtained. To verify the hypothesis, analysis was performed through the SPSS Process Macro. The study results indicate that a safety climate positively affects the safety compliance and safety participation of hotel workers. In addition, safety motivation mediated the relationship between safety climate and safety behavior, and the moderating effect of safety leadership on safety compliance was also supported. However, there was no moderating effect of safety leadership on safety participation, which is inferred to be due to the characteristics of the hotel industry. As a result of this study, it was found that safety leadership, a topic that was rarely addressed in previous safety-related studies, moderates the relationship between safety motivation and safety behavior of hotel workers. In addition, in the hotel industry, safety-related areas are being expanded through self-determination theory to understand the safety behavior of hotel workers and customers. Based on these research results, it can be suggested that hotels should develop strategic plans to establish a positive safety climate and actively come up with measures to motivate hotel workers to take safety behavior. However, the lack of coherence in terms because existing safety-related studies were mainly dealt with in psychology and engineering fields, makes it clear that the establishment of terminology should be preceded in the future. In addition, the limitation of this study is that the analysis of safety-related variables was carried out without distinction at the group level or the individual level.