Key drivers of trucking safety climate from the perspective of leader-member exchange: Bayesian network predictive modeling approach.

PURPOSE: Safety climate, which is defined as workers' shared perceptions of organizational policies, procedures, and practices as they relate to the true or relative value and importance of safety within an organization, is one of the best indicators of organizational safety outcomes. This study identifies key drivers of safety climate from the perspective of leader-member exchange (LMX). LMX is a theory describing the nature and processes of social interactions between a supervisor and a subordinate. This study examines the impact of individual drivers and combinations of drivers on safety climate through Bayesian Network simulations to predict practices which most effectively improve safety climate in the trucking industry. METHOD: Survey data were collected from 5083 truck drivers in a large U.S. trucking company. Bayesian Network analysis was used to identify key drivers (factors) of safety climate and the best joint strategies for improvement. The impact of the drivers on safety climate was assessed and the simulation identified their potential impact independently and in concert with other drivers. RESULTS: The results from Bayesian Network analyses showed that the effects of LMX on organization- and group-level safety climate were conditionally dependent on four other drivers including psychological ownership, supervisory integrity, situation awareness, and safety communication. Among the five contributing factors, supervisory integrity and LMX had the strongest independent effects on organization- and group-level safety climate. Moreover, the results indicated that the best two joint strategies for promoting organizational (company/top management level) safety climate were LMX and psychological ownership as well as LMX and situation awareness, whereas the best two joint strategies for improving group (workgroup/supervisor level) safety climate were joint optimization of LMX and safety communication as well as LMX and psychological ownership. IMPLICATIONS: Based on the study results, the strategies that may have the most potential to improve trucking safety climate are: enhancing leaders' ability to engage in high-quality exchanges (e.g., caring about employees), developing training to encourage employees/leaders to deliver on promises, and providing employees with more autonomy to enhance their ownership.

When supervisors perceive non-work support: test of a trickle-down model.

Using the trickle-down model as the theoretical foundation, we explored whether subordinates' perceived supervisory non-work support (subordinates' PSNS) mediates the relationship between supervisors' perception of higher-level managers' non-work support (supervisors' PSNS) and subordinates' organizational citizenship behaviors. Using dyadic data collected from 132 employees and their immediate supervisors, we found support for the aforementioned mediation process. Furthermore, supervisors' perceived in-group/out-group membership of subordinates moderated the aforementioned supervisors' PSNS-subordinates' PSNS relationship, such that this relationship is stronger for out-group subordinates. Theoretical and practical implications and future research directions are discussed.

Abusive supervision and workload demands from supervisors: exploring two types of supervisor-related stressors and their association with strain.

Our study aimed to identify two types of stressors from supervisors: abusive supervision (AS) and workload demands from supervisors (WDS). AS reflects the relationship dimension of supervisor-related stressors, and WDS reflects the task dimension of supervisor-related stressors. In Study 1, we attempted to distinguish between AS and WDS. The results of confirmatory factor analysis showed that AS and WDS are two distinct dimensions of supervisor-related stressors. In Study 2, we utilized job demands-resources model and investigated whether AS and WDS can uniquely predict subordinates' emotional exhaustion (EE). We also explored whether perceived job characteristics (PJCs) have differential moderating effects on the relationships between the two dimensions of supervisor-related stressors (AS and WDS) and EE. Consistent with our predictions, the results showed that both AS and WDS have incremental predictive effects on EE after controlling for the effect of the other. The results also revealed that PJCs weaken the WDS-EE relationship, not the AS-EE relationship. We discussed the theoretical and practical implications at the end.

Measurement equivalence/invariance of the abusive supervision measure across workers from Taiwan and the United States.

Growing international research interest in negative-leadership behaviors prompts the need to examine whether measures of ineffective leadership developed in the United States are equivalent across countries outside the United States. B. J. Tepper's (2000) abusive supervision measure has been used widely inside and outside the United States and merits research attention on its construct equivalence across different cultural settings. The authors conducted a series of multigroup confirmatory factor analyses to investigate the measurement equivalence of this measure across Taiwan (N = 256) and the United States (N = 389). Configural invariance was established, suggesting that both U.S. and Taiwanese samples perceive abusive supervision as a single-factor concept. Furthermore, the establishment of partial metric invariance and partial scalar invariance suggests that the abusive supervision measure is applicable to crosscultural comparisons in latent means, construct variance, construct covariances, and unstandardized path coefficients with the caution that workers from different cultures calibrate their responses differently when answering some items.

Psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the workaholism battery.

The authors designed the current study to examine the psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the workaholism battery (J. T. Spence & A. S. Robbins, 1992). Using the back-translation strategy recommended by R. Brislin (1980), the authors translated the original scale developed by Spence and Robbins. Factor analyses of responses from 1,235 full-time workers in Taiwan revealed a 5-factor solution. The reliability coefficients of the factors ranged from .58 to .88. Significant correlations between the 5 factors, the work-addiction risk test, career commitment, and job involvement provided evidence for convergent validity. Significant correlations between the 5 factors and criterion variables (emotional exhaustion, job satisfaction, and hours worked per week) provided evidence of concurrent criterion validity. Overall, the findings suggest that the Taiwanese workers conceptualize workaholism as 5 dimensions rather than the 2 or 3 dimensions that previous empirical studies (A. Kanai, M. Wakabayashi, & S. Fling, 1996; L. H. W. McMillan, E. C. Brady, M. P. Driscoll, & N. V. Marsh, 2002; J. T. Spence & A. S. Robbins, 1992) have suggested. The authors discussed implications and limitations of their findings.

Intentions to initiate mentoring relationships: understanding the impact of race, proactivity, feelings of deprivation, and relationship roles.

The authors used a within-subjects experiment to examine the following influences on intentions to initiate informal mentorship: race similarity (RS), proactivity, feelings of race-related fraternal relative deprivation (RD), and roles in the potential mentoring dyads (roles). The authors instructed 126 White participants to assume the roles of upperclassmen or freshmen, provided them with the profiles of 12 potential protégés or mentors, and asked them to indicate their intentions to initiate mentorship. The authors found significant main effects of RS and proactivity, and a significant interaction effect between RS and proactivity. RD moderated the significant main effects. Roles also moderated the significant main effects and the interaction between RS and RD. The findings add to the literature of diversified mentoring and RD.