Upward Safety Communication In The Workplace: How Team Leaders Stimulate Employees’ Voice Through Empowering and Monitoring Supervision

The importance of employees’ voice for workplace safety management is receiving growing attention. The present contribution focuses on three different categories of safety-specific voice behaviours and their links with complementary safety supervision styles: promotive voice (i.e. offering original suggestions to improve safety in work practices), preventive voice (i.e. raising personal concerns for potential risks), and proscriptive voice (i.e. speaking up against violations of safety standards). The first aim of the study is to provide evidence of the differential validity of the three categories of safety voice. Second, it intends to investigate how team leaders can stimulate these different kinds of employees’ voice. A survey investigation was conducted in a multinational chemical industry (N = 192). The statistical results of the study unveil that only empowering supervision affected promotive and preventive voices, whereas proscriptive voice was found to be affected by both empowering and monitoring supervision. Overall, the findings seem to indicate a substantial conceptual independence between the three categories of safety voice. At the same time, the study suggests that distinct supervision actions may affect these different expressions of employees’ safety voice in different ways, underlining the importance of a differential approach to these constructs, not only for research advancement, but also for the design of appropriate organisational programs aimed at stimulating open safety communication in the workplace, and to develop a more articulated approach to safety supervision, in order to support employees’ propensity to engage in appropriate safety voice actions, in accordance with their working situations.