Senior leaders can dramatically improve safety performance in their organizations by fostering a high-performance culture. Going beyond vocal support, leadership involvement uses a deliberate strategy to elicit the leadership behaviors needed to build a high-performance culture in the organization. By high-performance culture we do not mean something vague, but specifically a culture that exhibits high levels of the nine variables we described in the previous article of this series. These nine variables - teamwork, workgroup relations, procedural justice, perceived support, leader-member exchange, management credibility, organizational value for safety, upward communication, and approaching others - have been empirically demonstrated to predict safety performance.
The link between leadership activities and a high-performance safety culture is more than anecdotal. In working with more than 1,450 sites we have repeatedly seen that one of the biggest differences between sites that struggle and sites that succeed is leadership behavior. This is consistent with the critical success factors we discovered by comparing matched high-performing and struggling sites (Hidley, J. 1998. "Critical Success Factors for Behavior-Based Safety" Professional Safety. Vol. 43, No. 7 (July 1998): 30-34.).