Paternalistic leadership and cabin crews’ upward safety communication: The motivation of voice behavior

Abstract

Being the frontline operators in the airline industry, flight attendants constantly obtain and collect first-hand information from their interactions with passengers and other crew members. Their experiences and observations may contribute greatly to airlines' safety management and policy making. It is thus critical to learn how to enhance cabin crews' voice behavior, particularly communicating safety related issues upward through specific leadership styles. The current research aims at the flight attendants working for Taiwanese international airlines. The cabin crew department managers' paternalistic leadership style is adopted to observe how it may trigger cabin crews' different types of voice behavior. This research addresses the following two major questions: 1. What is the motivation for cabin crew to conduct upward safety communication? 2. How does department managers' paternalistic leadership style impact cabin crew's voice behavior? Regression analysis is used to analyze the empirical data collected by the questionnaire survey. The results are applied to provide airlines with practical references for constituting human resource management policies, and the findings also enhance existing literature regarding management applications and employees voice behaviors.