Leadership Styles
We can associate three fundamental safety leadership styles to the effectiveness of a safety culture: tough-coercive, tough-controlling, and tough-caring. Let's take a look a each of these leadership styles.
Tough-Coercive Leadership
In this leadership approach, managers are tough on safety to protect themselves: to avoid penalties. The manager's approach to controlling performance may primarily rely on the threat of punishment. The objective is to achieve compliance to fulfill legal or fiscal imperatives. The culture is fear-driven and toxic. Management resorts to an accountability system that emphasizes negative consequences. By what managers do and say, they may communicate negative messages to employees that establish or reinforce negative relationships.
As you might guess, fear-driven cultures, by definition cannot be effective in achieving world-class safety programs because employees work (and don't work) to avoid a negative consequence. Employees and managers all work to avoid punishment. Consequently, fear-driven thoughts, beliefs and decisions may be driving their behaviors. Bottom-line: a fear-driven safety culture will not work. It can not be effective for employees and managers at any level of the organization. It may be successful in achieving compliance, but that's it.
Knowledge Check Choose the best answer for the question.
1-5. Which of the following leadership styles is most likely to result in a fear-driven safety culture?
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