Voicing for Safety in the Workplace: A Proactive Goal Regulation Perspective

Safety voice refers to proactive communication actions that aim to improve safety by identifying current limitations and possibilities to create a safer workplace. This entails individuals to identify hazards and dangerous ways of working in advance, and provide constructive suggestions to generate a positive change. Drawing on goal regulation literature, we aim to investigate safety voice as a part of a dual safety-specific proactivity process: a goal generation phase characterised by mental simulation and anticipation of risks (namely ‘safety envisioning’), and a goal striving stage which involves acting aimed at enhancing safety (here represented by ‘safety voice’). Study 1a provides support to the distinction between these two phases in a large sample of laboratory supervisors (N = 233). Study 1b showed the predictive validity of safety envisioning on safety voice (N = 71 managers). Study 2 evidenced the effects of organizational antecedents (perceived job control; supervisor and coworker support) on goal safety envisioning in a large sample of chemical workers from Central Europe (N = 157). Our paper adds an emergent stream of research by applying a goal-regulatory perspective in occupational safety.