Effective Leader Safety Storytelling: its attributes and outcomes

The Challenge

Current research indicates that leaders’ safety communication crucially enhances workers’ safety performance, reducing injury rates and fostering a strong safety climate. Specifically, safety storytelling by leaders is proposed as an effective communication method to influence these outcomes. Yet, despite the proposed effectiveness, there remains limited research on leaders’ safety storytelling. This has resulted in a lack of comprehensive conceptualisations, with valid and reliable measures, for describing and assessing leader safety storytelling and the impacts of these stories.

Consequently, the practical development of leader safety storytelling as a skill has been hindered, potentially leaving a powerful safety communication tool underused. By conducting research to fill this gap, we can provide better guidance and training to leaders in safety storytelling, which may help strengthen organisations’ safety climate and improve workplace safety.

Proposed Solution

The research identifies the relevant attributes that make safety storytelling more or less impactful. A taxonomy of 9 key attributes of effective leader safety storytelling, including relatability, factuality, descriptiveness, consequence severity, structure, explicit appeal, delivery style, use of questions and visual aids.

The research identifies that impactful storytelling was also associated with increased self-reported safety behaviours such as safety participation and voice. It also showed that exposure to a safety story improved recipients’ safety attitudes and strengthened their intentions to behave safely relative to baseline levels.

The research demonstrated that safety storytelling can function as a relationship-building tool through which leaders foster trust and signal their approachability, as well as reinforce perceptions of their transformational qualities and commitment to safety. The study highlights the value of safety storytelling as a communication tool for leaders. But incorporating storytelling into routine interactions, such as toolbox talks, safety discussions, and spontaneous conversations, leaders can reinforce key safety messages and foster stronger relational ties with their teams.

Proposed Benefits to WA

This research provides a nuanced understanding of the storytelling attributes that enhance the effectiveness of leaders’ safety storytelling. It also supports the view that narrative persuasion processes serve as key psychological mechanisms through which these attributes influence the effectiveness of safety stories in shaping recipients’ safety-related outcomes.

Beyond safety outcomes, the research shows that safety storytelling can also impact workers’ perception of their leaders, by developing and testing a framework that links specific storytelling attributes to psychological processes and outcomes.

DOI

Thesis DOI: 10.26182/0ag2-hy94

Report DOI: 10.71342/660308586200