Safety leadership in high risk and highly regulated sectors: A theoretical framework

The investigation of major accidents reveals the importance of organizational factors and safety culture in ensuring safety in high-risk environments. Safety research highlights the existence of two types of safety: regulated and managed. While regulated safety focuses on technical/procedural barriers and predictable outcomes, managed safety refers to proactive behavior in face of unpredictable events. Research shows that regulated safety jeopardizes managed safety but there is dearth of research on their articulation and on the role of leaders in this context. Research on leadership has evolved from static leader-centric toward more processual and context-based models, requiring new methods. This paper develops a critical realist approach to studying safety leadership as a collective, dynamic and contingent process. We combine disparate theoretical domains (safety science, organizational and leadership theory) to propose a conceptual framework based on five mechanisms of managed safety: mobilization of a relational eco-system, risk awareness, vigilance towards weak signals, open/flexible thinking and learning. An integrated conceptual framework is operationalized via an illustrative case study developed in the context of a Pilot International School of Leadership for Safety. This conceptual framework allows to integrate dispersed literature and to improve our understanding of the roles of leaders and safety culture