ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Personality and Social Psychology
This article is part of the Research TopicEmployee Resilience - Volume IIView all articles
How safety leadership influences employee safety participation and compliance through safety knowledge: The moderating role of psychological resilience
Provisionally accepted
- Chung-Ang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
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This study developed a multilevel model to examine the mechanisms that link safety leadership to employee safety behaviors. We investigated (a) the mediating role of individual safety knowledge in the correlation between team-level safety leadership and employees' safety compliance and participation, and (b) the moderating role of psychological resilience in this mediation process. We gathered three-wave survey data from 505 frontline employees and 88 supervisors within China's electric power industry. Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) analysis confirmed that safety leadership positively influenced both safety compliance and participation. Employee safety knowledge significantly mediated this relationship. Furthermore, psychological resilience moderated this process: the positive effect of safety knowledge on both safety compliance and participation is stronger among employees with high psychological resilience. These findings indicate that organizations should invest in safety leadership training to enhance employee knowledge and foster psychological resilience as a crucial personal resource, enabling employees to more effectively convert safety knowledge into safe behavior.
Keywords: Safety leadership, Safety knowledge, psychological resilience, Safety compliance, Safety participation, hierarchical linear modeling
Received: 09 Aug 2025; Accepted: 17 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Piao and Hahn. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Juhee Hahn, jhan@cau.ac.kr
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