Gabriella Fägerlind

Leadership, gender and safety culture in the manufaturing industry

In Sweden there are about 40-50 fatal accidents in working life per year. 2011-2015 213 persons died in accidents at work, 7 % women and 93 % men (Arbetsmiljöverket, 2017). Of the workers victims of serious work accidents (more than 14 days of sick leave) 2011-2014 38 % are women and 62 % are men (Arbetsmiljöverket, 2016). The
overrepresentation of men in fatal and severe accidents at work cannot solely be explained by the fact that most
accidents happens in trades where men are in majority, this has been shown in comparisons with women working in these fields (Bauerle et al, 2015).

Accidents and fatal accidents at work give serious consequences for individuals and their significant others but are
also serious matters for employers and lead to different types of losses. Therefore, workplaces safety is in focus and a top priority in many industries. Health and safety issues, as well as accidents and incidents, are monitored closely, and actions and initiatives to improve safety and the safety performance are implemented and evaluated.

One of the focuses in safety science is research on how to improve safety performance with adequate safety
management, in order to prevent accidents and incident. One part of this is the study of organizations’ safety culture, to explore how attitudes to safety and aspects of the workplace culture may affect safety. Although most of the research regarding safety at work is carried out in risky and dangerous occupations where men are highly overrepresented, gender, as well as masculinity, are under-researched in safety science. (Jensen et al, 2014, Nielsen et al, 2015, Arbetsmiljöverket, 2017). Nielsen et al (2015), Iacuone, (2005), among others, argue that few studies have examined the link between masculinity and organizational safety performance, although masculinity likely play a role.

The aim of my research project is to explore the relationship between leadership and safety, by focusing on the
interplay between gender and the organization’s safety culture. This includes to develop knowledge about the
management of actions and processes that uphold, or downplay, safety at a workplace, and how these are affected
by gender. This can include for example; Masculinity is often mentioned as one of the foundations of the dominant
discourse of management, thus, notions of leadership and masculinity may affect managers’ (men and women) ways of managing (create and sustain) the safety culture; The gender relations between the manager and employees, including e.g. gender roles and competing masculinities, as well as power relations (management’s power to impose safety rules and workers’ power to resist to change behaviors) may all affect the safety culture and safety performance; The trade-off between safety and areas such as productivity, costs and time, and these trade-offs might be linked to gendered norms (e.g. traditional masculine norms); The gap between espoused values and priorities regarding safety and enacted values and priorities, might also be be linked to gendered norms and behaviors.

My main research question is: How does the social construction of gender and notions of safety interact to uphold, or downplay, safety in the workplace? The two sub research questions are: How do managers explain and understand their role in workplace safety and the safety culture? How does masculinity play a role when managers and employees negotiate/co-create the safety culture at work? The purpose of the data collection in my study is to get knowledge, insights and un understanding of the nature of the safety culture and safety violations at work. What type of minor and major violations, incidents and accidents happen? When and why does violations, incidents and
accidents happen at the workplace? Why, for what reasons, do managers and employees break safety policies and
safety rules? What do managers communicate verbally and non-verbally regarding safety? What are employees’
notions about safety and its importance at work (their own, their manager’s and the employer’s)?

This thesis is expected to enrich the body of knowledge of safety culture with a gender perspective, and thus both
contribute to the body of knowledge in safety studies as well to the body of knowledge in gender studies. The
expected theoretical contribution is to develop and expand knowledge on the interplay between the construction of
gender and the notion of safety and its effect on leadership and the workplace’s safety culture. This would further
detail the theoretical understanding of leadership’s important role in safety cultures. The expected empirical
contribution of the thesis is that it will inform employer, managers and employees of the importance of also focus on
assumptions and behaviors linked to gender and masculinities when developing the safety culture. The results of this research could be included in workplace training on safety for managers and employees as well as in a variety of tools to support workplace safety and the safety culture.