How Does Leadership Style Affect Safety? A Mixed-Methods Investigation for the Influence of Superiors’ Varying Leadership Style on the Stress and Safety of Construction Workers

Unsafe behavior of construction workers is the major contributor to the prominent construction accidents, and more and more studies claimed that suffering from occupational stress could exacerbate the unsafe behavior of workers. Frontline professionals have the intensive interactions with workers and are responsible for managing and supporting workers to complete various construction tasks. Frontline professionals may adopt diverse leadership style, while it is likely that varying leadership style could lead to different outcomes in terms of stress and safety. This study aims to examine the influence of several leadership styles adopted by frontline professionals on the stress and safety behavior of construction workers through a two-steps study using mixed method. Firstly, a questionnaire survey was administered among construction workers to collect over 120 valid empirical data that were subjected to a series of statistical analyses, including exploratory factor analysis, reliability test and multiple regression models. Secondly, agent-based simulations were performed to verify the statistical results regarding the relationships between leadership style, stress and safety. The results show that: 1) emotional stress and burnout of construction workers could cause safety incompliance; 2) autocratic and destructive leadership styles consistently spur emotional stress and burnout of construction workers; and 3) it was interesting to find that safety-specific transformational leadership does directly promote safety participation of workers but not affect stress. The implications of the findings were discussed and practical recommendations were also made to enhance stress management and prevent unsafe behavior of construction workers. Through innovative application of mixed methods, this paper mainly contributed to answer how does varying leadership style lead to different safety outcomes from stress management perspective.