Paradoxical safety leadership
Hu, X., Jiang, L., Willis, S., Casey, T., & Wu, C. H. (2024). Paradoxical safety leadership: Conceptualization and measurement. Journal of Organizational Behavior.
Our opinion
An article that sheds light on and measures how managers navigate the daily tensions between safety and productivity, as well as many other dimensions.
Our summary
Leadership is closely linked to a commitment to workplace safety, regardless of the school of thought (see Lyubyck's 2022 meta-analysis). All perspectives support the idea of "safety first," emphasizing leaders' dedication to this principle. However, adopting this stance inevitably requires an approach to resolving the inherent tensions between safety and productivity conflicts.
The reality of "safety first" clashes with an increasingly complex world, to the point where many researchers view it as a myth. Instead, the focus shifts to the art of navigating contradictory objectives while maintaining control over the most severe aspects of safety, rather than envisioning a permanent priority or zero-defect ideal.
This modern approach, largely inspired by writings from the resilience engineering movement, compels us to view an effective manager as someone who operates with a "both-and" mindset, adept at managing tensions in performance, design, and the evaluation of safety performance.
The proposed research is derived from three major historical contributions
Theorie of paradox
Smith, W. K., & Lewis, M. W. (2011). Toward a theory of paradox: A dynamic equilibrium model of organizing. Academy of Management Review, 36(2), 381–403
This theory asserts that managers address paradoxes in two primary ways: through an "either-or" approach or a "both-and" approach. The "either-or" method often delivers superior short-term performance but inevitably exacerbates tensions, potentially leading to organizational paralysis and accidents. Conversely, the "both-and" strategy facilitates more effective long-term tension management but demands continuous innovation, learning, and performance adaptation.
Paradoxical Safety Leadership - PSL
Zhang, Y., Waldman, D. A., Han, Y. L., & Li, X. B. (2015). Paradoxical leader behaviors in people management: Antecedents and consequences. Academy of Management Journal, 58(2), 538–566
The concept of paradoxical leadership builds on paradox theory by characterizing and measuring managers' actual responses in context.
ETTO principel (Efficiency–thoroughness trade-off)
Hollnagel, E. (2017). The ETTO principle: Efficiency–thoroughness trade-off: Why things that go right sometimes go wrong. CRC Press.
Hollnagel, E. (2020). Synesis: The unification of productivity, quality, safety and reliability. Routledge.
This model historically underpins the entire formulation of managerial paradoxes, describing the trade-offs between productivity—the minimum conditions required for maximum success—and caution—the necessary conditions to avoid undesirable consequences.
The two extremes (overperformance versus overcaution) cannot be maximized simultaneously, as their optimizations are mutually exclusive. Thus, the goal is to satisfy competing and interdependent demands (action on one affects the other). In this logic, safety, when under pressure, can no longer be seen as an isolated and absolutely overriding dimension. It requires balancing both stability and flexibility.
Leaders achieve this by simultaneously producing recommendations and regulations to follow (the "regulated") while being ready to make exceptions when those rules are unsuitable for the situation or outdated (the "managed"). Exercising this adaptive leadership involves transitioning from a transactional leadership style, which encourages compliance, to a transformational leadership style, which promotes employees' active contribution to safety.
Literature Review on Management Paradoxes
To refine this general framework, the authors conducted an extensive literature review on the various expressions of management paradoxes related to safety and identified 10 tensions categorized into three major groups.
Adaptation to a lack of resources in light of simultaneous demands
- Safety vs production
- Safety vs cost
- Managing safety-related information, balancing between information pull vs information push
- Effectiveness vs visibility
Adaptation to a lack of resources in light of simultaneous demands
- Stability vs flexibility
- Exploitation vs exploration
- Understanding safety vs doing safety
The distribution of authority and decision-making within the hierarchical structure
- Discipline vs empowerment
- Centralized vs distributed decision-making
- Top-down vs bottom-up influence
The way of managing "both-and" and "at every moment" these 10 tensions is supposed to reflect the style, quality, and characteristics of the paradoxical leadership of each manager or the organization being studied.
A tool for measuring paradoxical leadership (PSL)
The rest of the article is a validity test in 7 steps of a measurement tool for paradoxical safety leadership (PSL).
STEP 1 - Identification of the 10 tensions.
STEP 2 - Reduction of the 10 tensions to 4 tensions through aggregation and prioritization after submission to experts:
- A multidisciplinary team of 15 international academic experts in the field.
- A second team of 14 field experts.
- Each of these teams was asked to assess the 10 tensions on a 5-point Likert scale (from very important to not important), potentially adding new tensions.
- The tensions suggested by these experts were ultimately not retained due to a lack of consensus (for example, physical health vs mental health, central safety vs local safety).
- Four main tensions emerged as a consensus from these judgments, accounting for 77.6% of the total variance in the results. These four tensions reflect four concrete dimensions for adjusting the management model.
Four tensions
- Safety vs production
- Time spent in the office vs on the field
- Stability vs flexibility
- Leadership's safety ideals vs on-the-ground needs and realities
Four concrete dimensions for adjusting the management model
- Emphasizing the "both-and" in each tension vs addressing them exclusively
- Strengthening safety while allowing for flexibility
- Better aligning the executive's safety vision with on-the-ground realities
- Balancing time spent on administrative tasks with time spent in the field
STEP 3 - To develop a measurement tool for PSL, the authors designed 5 descriptive items for each of these 4 tensions and submitted them to a panel of judges (academic experts, field experts, and employees in high-risk industries) for consensus.
STEP 4 - These evaluations by the panel led to successive reformulations to clarify the 5 descriptors.
STEP 5 - The 20 descriptors of the 4 tensions were eventually reduced to 16, which were then submitted to a panel of experts for content optimization, ultimately resulting in 12 consensual and validated descriptive items.
STEP 6 - Complementary work focused on the discriminant validity of these 12 items in context and the analysis of their internal robustness.
STEP 7 - The final analysis includes field validation on a case study, demonstrating that the proposed PSL measurement tool is definitively valid.
Ultimately, PSL allows for measuring the adjustment of high-level strategies employed by organizations and managers to manage the "both-and" approach on safety dimensions under tension. It remains essential to correlate this measurement with the results (safety, performance, etc.) achieved in the field context, and perhaps to translate these managerial know-how into training programs for managers on their safety practices.
A comment by Éric Marsden on the methodology used by the researchers and the strength of the conclusions that can be drawn:
The authors chose to exclude the item "makes safety-related decisions that adhere to upper management's views and also listens to opinions of frontline employees" from their categorization, after industrial informants suggested that frontline decisions should follow the official safety policy, rather than the attitudes perceived within the leadership team. This choice seems questionable and would be interesting to explore in a specific study.
The article addresses safety leadership in high-risk industries, but the interviews were conducted in the hospitality sector in China. At first glance, this sector seems quite distant from industries at risk of major accidents. Furthermore, one might think that the cultural and political context in China could influence employees' responses to questions about paradoxical practices of their leaders, leading to biases that may not be predictive of attitudes in other countries.
The authors suggest that managers in high-risk companies should be trained to manage safety paradoxes by developing "personal strategies." Among the strategies mentioned in the article is the suggestion of deliberately deviating from safety rules to resolve certain tensions. The authors also suggest that their paradoxical leadership measurement scale could be deployed as an advanced indicator of safety levels. These suggestions seem particularly risky, as they are based on responses to questions about the perception of paradoxical situations or trade-offs, without examining the perceived or actual safety levels in the companies observed, nor considering the potential adverse effects that training advising deviations from safety instructions might induce.
