Relationship among leadership styles, employee’s well-being and employee’s safety behavior: an empirical evidence of COVID-19 from the frontline healthcare workers

Abstract

The study investigates the association among leadership styles, employee well-being and employee’s safety behavior of healthcare workers. The study used social learning theory (SLT) for examining the relationship between leadership styles and employee safety behavior. Moreover, social exchange theory (SET) has been incorporated to narrate the moderating effect of employee well-being on the relationship between leadership styles and employee safety behavior. Data have been collected with the help of questionnaires from 515 healthcare workers working in the public hospitals of Punjab, Pakistan. Structural equation modeling has been utilized to test the study hypothesis. Findings indicate that both transactional and transformational leaderships have significant and positive relationship with employee safety behavior. Interestingly, employee well-being negatively moderates the relationship between transformational leadership and employee safety behavior. Furthermore, no moderation was found on the relationship between transactional leadership and employee safety behavior. The findings propose that healthcare management should invest to aware employees regarding their well-being. The findings also suggest that leaders should influence their followers to adopt safety measures at workplace. Furthermore, leaders must be role models in order to attain a competitive advantage and make a balance between management and workers.