For a safety management system to be effective, it must be partnered with an effective leadership technique. This article seeks to establish a model for safety leadership that has been created in light of leadership discussion within the safety community and mainstream thought on organizational leadership.
The author explored select literature on safety leadership to determine common ground and benchmark that information against mainstream leadership literature in order to establish a model for organizational safety leadership. This information was helpful in under-standing the degree to which the status quo is being supported or whether innovative aspects of leader-ship are needed to incorporate organizational man-agers in workplace safety leadership.
Articles published in Professional Safety from 2000 to 2009 were reviewed to identify common themes related to principles of workplace safety leadership. Doing so informs an understanding of what the safety profession has considered as important when addressing workplace safety leadership. These articles were selected because they present a perspective of what the professional safety community deems as imperative in leading workplace safety.
Articles were limited to those appearing in PS due to the journal's status as the primary peer-re-viewed journal within the safety profession. It was essential to limit the research to peer-reviewed articles in order to present perspectives that have been reviewed by those in the safety community rather than simply thoughts and opinions that might appear in non-peer-reviewed publications.
This information was then benchmarked against mainstream leadership literature to determine a model that can be used to effectively engage organizational managers who may already exercise leadership skills based on these mainstream models. A sample of mainstream leadership literature was purposefully selected (Creswell, 2007) to deeply explore how themes in safety literature can be integrated into components of these main-stream models.
