Emergence of Informal Safety Leadership: A Social-Cognitive Process for Accident Prevention

As an important domain of disaster management, accident prevention is an urgent and crucial subject because of the high frequency and severe consequences of industrial accidents in recent times. Current researchers focus on organization-level safety antecedents, among which leadership receives the highest attention. However, formal leadership of senior managers is limited by the level-by-level effect attenuation, such that frontline accidents cannot be controlled substantially. Thus, this study proposes the construct of informal safety leadership (ISL), which emerges among frontline workers through socially cognitive interactions. We develop a moderated mediating conceptual model to explore the ISL emergence mechanism from the social-cognitive perspective. Across two studies, that is, a three-wave field study and an agent-based modeling simulation experiment, we find that three social-cognitive elements are positively associated with ISL emergence, which in turn predicts safety organizational citizenship behavior and perceived followership. Moreover, this relationship is conditional on formal leadership support. We contribute to disaster management literature by articulating how informal leaders emerge from the operational frontline to possess safety leadership traits. We also give insight into leadership emergence by clearly indicating that who becomes a leader is an inherently social process, dependent on peers who bestow influence to a person engaging in leader-like behaviors. We thus provide a unique perspective on practical efforts to leverage benefits of the closest and most immediate leadership in frontline accident prevention.