Safety | Leadership: Altruism, Learning, and Safety Performance Continued from page 39 only what they are equipped to give their group. This search for substance led to more refined descriptions of leadership methodology, with a focus on the follower as a means of evaluating leadership effectiveness. Servant leadership was first described by Robert Greenleaf in the 1970s, though the ideas he proposed were relatively unknown until they were further refined by Larry Spears in the mid-1990s. Spears proposed distilling the concept to 10 primary characteristics of servant leaders: ■■ ■■ ■■ Listening Empathy Healing ■■ Awareness Persuasion ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ Conceptualization Foresight Stewardship ■■ Commitment to the growth of the people Building community Greenleaf’s and Spears’ work marked a change in leadership study, focusing on more specific, learnable behaviors consistent with leadership, rather than describing an innate, rela- tively unchangeable ability. Servant leadership theory gave voice to associ- ated ideas, like ethical leadership and altruistic leadership (also shown to correlate to safety outcomes), as well as to ideas on transformational lead- ership, now one of the most widely- researched leadership theories. Transformational leadership theory emerged as an extension to models that were largely transac- tional; in other words, they empha- sized organizational structure and boundaries, as well as monitoring and evaluation as the primary means Aviation Business Journal | 4th Quarter 2017 ■■ of control. Transformational lead- ership, on the other hand, takes a more strategic view, by aiming to increase intrinsic motivation among employees through attempts to link organizational goals to individual strengths and aspirations. Bernard Bass, one of the most widely-known proponents of transformational leadership theory, breaks the concept into four parts, which can be con- trasted with transactional leadership: Transformational Leadership ■■ Charisma: Provides vision and sense of mission, instills pride, gains respect and trust. ■■ Inspiration: Communicates high expectations, uses sym- bols to focus efforts, and expresses important pur- poses in simple ways. Intellectual Stimulation: Promotes intelligence, rational- ity, and careful problem solving. ■■ Individualized Consideration: Gives personal attention, treats each employee individu- ally, coaches, and advises. Transactional Leadership ■■ Contingent Reward: Contracts exchange of rewards for effort, promises rewards for good performance and rec- ognizes accomplishments. ■■ Management by Exception (active): Watches and searches for deviations from rules and standards, takes corrective action. ■■ Management by Exception (passive): Intervenes only if standards are not met. Laissez-Faire: Abdicates responsibilities, avoids making decisions (Bass, 1990, p. 22) Transformational leadership inspires and supports, and nearly 100 studies suggest positive relationships between transformational leadership and organizational outcomes. Julian Barling, et al. (2002) Anne Wu, et al. (2008), and David Freiwald, et al. (2013) describe specific research empirically linking the four compo- nents of transformational leader- ship outlined by Bass (i.e. idealized influence, inspirational motiva- tion, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration) to improvements in workplace safety climate and performance. Knowing that transformational leader- ship is most effective amongst the various styles, has the most positive outcomes with respect to job sat- isfaction, and is clearly linked to improved safety outcomes, how might leadership be used to increase safety performance in practice? ■■ Safety Leadership It is worth mentioning here the delineation between leadership as a general concept and safety leadership. We often associate leadership with position, assuming that leaders lead, and followers follow, and that those roles are clearly defined. Safety lead- ership assumes no such positional authority, and as Hudson (2001) notes, leading in safety only requires a public commitment to reaching one step higher on the ladder of safety culture than where the organization already sits. That said, the FAA and others have clearly pointed to a need Continued on page 42 41
