Leading the way to a safer workplace: What enables supervisors to be servant leaders and enhance subordinates’ workplace safety behaviors?

Introduction: Drawing on the Motivation-Ability-Opportunity (MAO) framework and social information processing (SIP) theory, we hypothesized that supervisors demonstrate the highest level of servant leadership when their prosocial motivation (motivation), perspective taking (ability), and perceived collaborative-based HR configuration (opportunity) are all high. Moreover, we also hypothesized that servant leadership plays an important channeling role that links the three-way interaction and subordinates’ workplace safety behaviors. Method: We recruited 167 supervisor-subordinate dyads across high-risk and non-high-risk industries via LinkedIn and authors’ professional networks. We then conducted hierarchical moderated regressions and SPSS Macro to test the proposed hypotheses. Results: The three-way interaction of prosocial motivation, perspective taking, and collaborative-based HR configuration significantly predicted perceived servant leadership behaviors, which in turn enhanced subordinates’ safety compliance and participation. Conclusions: In accordance with the MAO framework and SIP theory, a leadership system that simultaneously comprises these three key elements is most conducive to the emergence of servant leadership, which in turn enhances subordinates’ workplace safety behaviors. Practical applications: First, we recommend that organizations consider perspective taking and prosocial motivation as potential selection criteria for leadership or supervisory roles, to ensure that supervisors have the required capabilities to serve. Second, organizations could benefit from designing interventions to improve supervisors’ perspective taking and prosocial motivation. Third, organizations could use team-based pay design (e.g., team-based incentives) to further enhance the influence of a collaborative-based HR configuration. Fourth, given that the more subordinates emulate supervisors’ behaviors of putting others’ first and self-transcendence, the more they demonstrate safety behaviors, organizational interventions that can increase the salience of supervisors’ behaviors in the eyes of subordinates could be useful.