Distributed workers - those who work autonomously and remotely from their organization’s main locations for at least some of their work-time, are an important and growing proportion of the workforce that share common characteristics of temporal and spatial distance. Yet many leadership styles and management practices assume face-to-face interaction, potentially rendering them less helpful in trying to ensure good occupational safety and health (OSH) outcomes for distributed workers. We conducted a systematic literature review to examine the leadership and management of OSH for distributed workers. Twenty-three papers were identified. Eleven papers identified established leadership styles, including leader-member exchange, (safety-specific) transformational and considerate leadership. Twenty papers examined management. Findings from these 20 papers were interpreted as representing resources, deployed through management and utilized by managers to ensure OSH for distributed workers, including communication technologies, social support, and a good safety climate. Despite limited research in this area, findings indicate the importance of both leadership and management in ensuring OSH for distributed workers. Findings suggest a fertile area for future enquiry
Current frameworks of leadership are based on face-to-face interaction. A growing number of workers work away from their main location of work; this makes it challenging for leaders to ensure the health and safety of distributed workers. In the present study, we explore the relationship between line managers' health and safety leadership and distributed workers' health and safety behaviours. We also explore the organizational procedures and practices that may enhance the impact of health and safety leadership. We included a broad range of distributed workers (in analyses, minimum N = 626) from 11 organizations. We found that health-and-safety-specific leadership was positively related to distributed workers' self-rated health, safety compliance and safety proactivity. These relationships were augmented by distributed workers' sense of being included in the workplace. Knowledge sharing among colleagues was associated with safety compliance when health-and-safety-specific leadership was low. Our results indicate that one way of addressing the challenges of distributed working may be through line managers putting health and safety on the agenda.
Copies of the interview schedules are available on request.Acknowledgements. This research has been supported by Economic and Social Research Council grant references numbers ES/S012648/1 and ES/T001771/1. Data availability. Supporting data are not yet publicly available, but will be made available by the UK Data Service upon completion of project ES/S012648/1. The data used in this paper are part of a wider project that involves three waves of data collection with informants in eight organisations collected during 2020 and 2021. These data are supplemented by data collected from interviews with organisational sponsors and organisational documents. The data used in the current paper pertain to five organisations from which we were able to collect data in the months following the first lockdown in the UK in response to the COVID-19 crisis. This paper has been accepted for publication in British Journal of Management. This is not the copy of record.
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