Management blame the Operators - 'They don't follow the procedures or do what they are told'

Operators blame the Management - 'Management don't listen or take safety seriously'

What we need to do is get everyone working of the same page and don't blame everyone else for the problems. Until everyone is working together and respecting each other Management or Operator things will never change

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Several research papers in several peer-reviewed journals by E Kevin Kelloway, a Canadian safety psychologist, and his colleagues report on effectiveness of training in 'Transformational leadership' that is safety specific, in particular papers that reported on TLSS compared to 'passive' safety management (of the kind outlined in the article you refer to) and on 'inconsistant safety leadership that veered between TLSS and safety-passive leadership.

There's alao an interesting report in Social Marketing Quarterly on social network analysis applied to diffusing safety leadership in the agricultural sector.

Arguably, a valuable innovation in the UK would include training in TLSS in several organisations, with before and after measures of practices of social networking by managers including safety leaders.

Originally Posted by: KieranD

 'Transformational leadership'

I don't care how many research papers have been written by E Kevin Kelloway that is not a word. Someone just realised you couldn't call it Change Management (been done) a just decided to [expletive deleted]ise the english language instead

It is timely to highlight the misconception reported in the research of Waters and Wadsworth on the part of sernior managers who fail to follow through on the ideal of 'behavioural safety.

At the same time, it is utterl;y false to assert that Transformational leadership has the same effect - an expression of bigotry and ignorance without a shred of evidence. Such falsehood and bigotry  contributes to beliefs about the safety practitioners  as hostile to research, which as Loftsted demonstrated in 2011, is a bulwark of bona fide professional work.

Safety-specific Transformational Leadership is actually a specific form of cultural change, in which leaders at all leaders are accountable for developing and coaching those who report to them.  It has the advangtages of sharing the framework of a style of management widely practised in other areas of management and of building on decades of rigorous statistical analysis.

Social network analysis can directly address the problem hightlighted by Waters and Wadsworth.  It has the advantage that it is already used in state-of-the-art HR practitioners recognised as pacemakers in employee engagement in growing firms in the IT sector, in the UK and abroad.

Safety will continue to struggle with lack of recognition to the extent that practitioners simply react emotively rather than gather relevant evidence and evaluate it.