Εnhancing Safety Performance in Ηigh Reliability Organizations. Α Research Approach in the Hellenic Air Force.

Despite attempts to improve workplace safety, thousands of deaths and disabilities occur each year worldwide, even in the most advanced countries, due to occupational accidents. Workplace accidents have tremendous economic and social costs. On the contrary intervention methods aim to improve safety performance in the workplace lack universality and consensus among organizations and practitioners. Despite public and private organizations’ great efforts to improve training and equipment, there are much that can be done to further understand how the work environment and organizational climate enhance safety performance and productivity. Moreover, it is very critical to examine how certain human resource management practices and leadership behaviors and styles might influence safety performance and group behavior among individuals. So, one of the question that arises is if there are certain leadership best practices in order to improve safety climate and performance, especially in High-Reliability Organizations (HRO). Τhe overall goal of this research was to examine how safety climate and safety performance can be enhanced in a HRO environment like Hellenic Air Force (HAF). We tried to explore the influence of different leadership styles and leadership interventions and practices that have been applied by HAF to certain safety programs, on safety climate and safety performance. More specifically, our focus was to examine the role of Risk Management, Training and Perceived Work Pressure as well as the leadership styles of Inspirational Leadership, Rational Objective Leadership and Passive Leadership, on Perceived Safety Climate and Safety Performance. We tested our hypotheses in a sample of 156 officers and non commission officers of the Hellenic Air Force. A questionnaire with closed questions was constructed in order to gather the appropriate data. The findings showed that perceived safety climate plays an important role in enhancing safety performance in a high reliability organization like HAF. Risk Management and training programs implementation in the workplace are critical variables in order to elevate perceived safety climate and in turn employee safety compliance and participation.  On the other hand, HAF should continue striving towards the creation of inspirational leaders able to inspire and educate subordinates, making at the same time easier to alleviate the negative effects of operational characteristics like work pressure on safety. Besides, accident deterioration and mishap prevention in organizations like HAF, effective and inspirational leadership, creative thinking and targeted interventions are of a major importance. Therefore, this study suggests that by improving supervisors’ decision making in small teams (units) and at the same time by improving and modernize certain leadership interventions, especially in groups, could create a safety climate that in turn may improve both operational and non-operational safety performance.