Leadership Styles and Safety Leadership: A Remedy for Human Caused Occupational Accidents

Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) is one of the current topics of high concern for both private sector and public sector organizations. The two main aims of this study are first, to explain the role of the managers as safety leaders in strenghtening the organization’s safety culture and effectively managing the human factor, which is considered to be the most common factor in workplace accidents. The second aim is to revise literature and to determine the leadership styles defined to be best fitting a safety leader in order to set basic qualities of a good safety leader. In this context, first, the concept of safety leadership and its contribution to OHS will be explained. Consequently, it will be possible to determine the best leadership styles that a safety leader should adopt, in order to decrease workplace accident rates which is a problem for individual businesses at micro level and a problem for the state economy at macro level. As a result, the possible and valuable contribution of organizational studies and human resources disciplines to OHS efforts will be established. Moreover, safety leaderhip will be introduced to the leadership literature in Turkey as a new topic for innovative and original studies