Synergetic effect of safety culture and safety climate on safety performance in SMEs: does transformation leadership have a moderating role?

Objectives. In developing countries, health and safety is not given importance especially in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Incidents in health and safety are continuously increasing. The major reason is a lack of workplace safety culture. Secondly, enterprises lack resources, therefore it becomes hard for them to provide safety climate. Along with safety climate and safety culture, the behavior of leadership plays a significant role toward safety performance. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to analyze the moderating role of leadership for gaining safety performance through safety culture and safety climate. Methods. For the said purpose, the authors collected data from laborers and managers. A structured questionnaire was adopted and, after ensuring the reliability, structural equation modeling was applied. Results. The findings revealed that safety culture and safety climate both have a significant impact over safety performance; however, transformational leadership only moderates the relationship between safety culture and safety performance. Conclusions. Identification of the moderating role of transformational leadership is a significant contribution in social cognitive theory. Future researchers are also guided to identify the same link for large industries of developing countries.