Safety And Health Of Its Employees example essay topic

Running head: TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP AND SAFETY Transformational Leadership and Safety Jesse R. Blount Baker College Transformational Leadership and Safety The Postal Service in Baton Rouge and cities around the nation has a poor reputation when it comes to safety and health of its employees. In an attempt to debunk this unjust accusation, Management and craft employees alike set out to accomplish a task never before achieved by a postal facility with more than 20 employees. Many managers in the Southwest Area thought it suicide to invite the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in for an inspection and try to achieve the highest recommendation obtainable, the coveted "STAR" award. The plants 491 employees, supervisors and managers using transformational leadership, prepared for and accomplished this achievement in only 90 days.

Transformational Leadership by definition is the broadening and elevating of the awareness, acceptance and attitudes of the workforce beyond their personal interest for the good of a group or company (Bass, 1990) Management, union officials, and craft employees acting as safety captains, worked together to motivate the workforce to see a bigger picture. The first and most important task was building a relationship of trust. The Postal Service is notorious for discipline of its employees when something goes wrong but is slow to reward these same employees for a job well done. The Plant Manager at Baton Rouge, Joseph Tate a 42-year veteran of the service, decided that charisma, intellectual stimulation and individualized consideration, as discussed by Sally A. Carless (1998) were necessary in achieving a cultural change. He believed that in order to achieve a STAR rating the employees would have to come on board. With the blessings of the Louisiana District office, he instituted a new safety program that was fashioned after that of Dow Chemical, 3-M and other industry leaders.

Employee involvement, as in every industrial success, was the key. Employees selected their own safety captains from the craft workers. Instead of the supervisors of each unit giving the same old boring safety talks, it was now the responsibility of the safety captains to present relevant safety information for each unit. Safety captains gathered information throughout the week, and used examples, tasks, tools and materials used within the unit for these talks. Weekly safety meetings became participative and interesting from the onset. Monthly meetings attended by the safety captains, the plant manager, and the district safety manager proved extremely productive.

Monthly safety contests with prizes, job safety analysis completed by the employees themselves, additional OSHA sanctioned training, and a safety information centers on the workroom floor were but a few of the ideas implemented. Behavioral integrity was a key factor in the new safety program. "Behavioral integrity is the perceived degree of congruence between the values expressed b words and those expressed through actions" (Simons, 1999). Once management at all levels began to back up its words with actions, rewarding the units and employees for a job well done as well as retraining when problems were found to exist, the entire atmosphere changed.

Safety was no longer a 15-minute sleep session once a week but a growing, living part of every workers day. By the time the OSHA team came in for the week long inspection less than one percent of the employees expressed resentment. The inspectors interviewed employees from all three tours of the 24-hour facility. With one exception, these randomly selected employees performed like a well-oiled machine. They knew all the relevant safety information for their respective jobs, what to do in case of just about any sort of emergency, and many knew far more about regulations than the interviewers ever expected. One of the comments left behind with the recommendation was that the perception going in was very wrong, and that this was truly a team dedicated to the welfare of all.

Bibliography

Bass, B.M. (1990, Winter).
From transactional to transformational leadership: Learning to share the vision. Journal of Organizational Dynamics, 18 (3), 19. Retrieved March 16, 2003 from the Pro Quest database.
Carless, S.A. (1998, December).
Assessing the discriminate validity of transformational leader behavior as measured by the ML. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 71 (4), 353. Retrieved March 16, 2003 from the Infotrac database.
Simons, T.L. (1999).
Behavioral integrity as a critical ingredient for transformational leadership. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 12 (2), 89-104. Retrieved March 15, 2003 from the Pro Quest database.