Can Civility Norms Boost Positive Effects of Management Commitment to Safety?

We proposed that civility norms would strengthen relationships between management commitment to safety and workers' safety motivation, safety behaviors, and injuries. Survey data were obtained from working adults in hazardous jobs—those for which physical labor is required and/or a realistic possibility of physical injury is present (N = 290). Results showed that management commitment positively related to workers' safety motivation, safety participation, and safety compliance, and negatively related to minor injuries. Furthermore, management commitment to safety displayed a stronger positive relationship with safety motivation and safety participation, and a stronger negative relationship with minor worker injuries when civility norms were high (versus low). The results confirm existing known relationships between management commitment to safety and worker safety motivation and behavior; furthermore, civility norms facilitate the relationships between management commitment to safety and various outcomes important to worker safety. In order to promote an optimally safe working environment, managers should demonstrate a commitment to worker safety and promote positive norms for interpersonal treatment between workers in their units.     

Does avoidance‐attachment style attenuate the benefits of being listened to?

We tested both Rogers's hypothesis that listening enables speakers to experience psychological safety and our hypothesis that the benefit of listening for psychological safety is attenuated by avoidance‐attachment style. We tested these hypotheses in six laboratory experiments, a field correlational study, and a scenario experiment. We meta‐analyzed the results of the laboratory experiments and found that listening increased psychological safety on average but that the variance between the experiments was also significant. The between experiment variance in the effect of listening manipulation on psychological safety exposes a methodological challenge in choosing a research paradigm of good‐versus‐normal listening, as opposed to normal‐versus‐poor listening. More importantly, we found, as expected and across all designs, that the higher the avoidance‐attachment style was, the lower the effect of listening on psychological safety. This finding has implications both for practice and for placing a theoretical boundary on Rogers's theory.