How Leadership Behaviour Shapes Wellbeing in High-Risk Workplaces

In a study published in 1996, Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson found something in her hospital data that looked backwards. The better-led nursing units had higher recorded rates of drug errors.

The likeliest reason was reporting. People in those units trusted how their managers would respond, so mistakes came forward. Edmondson's explanation became the starting point for her later work on psychological safety.

The same pattern plays out on drill floors, bridges and mine sites. A supervisor's reaction to bad news decides whether the next piece of bad news arrives at all.

That is the core of the link between leadership and workplace wellbeing in high-risk industries. Leader behaviour is one of the main sources of psychosocial risk. It is also the strongest control most organisations have.

Is leadership behaviour a psychosocial hazard?

Yes. The standards already treat it as one.

ISO 45003 sorts psychosocial hazards into three groups, and one covers social factors at work. Leadership appears in that group by name. The examples read like a bad day on site: unclear objectives, information held back, complaints and suggestions ignored, weak support, unfair treatment and inconsistent decisions.

Australia's model Code of Practice on psychosocial hazards takes the same line. Poor support, which includes practical and emotional support from managers, is a listed hazard. So is poor organisational justice, which covers policies applied inconsistently and bias in how work and resources are handed out. Under Australian WHS law, employers must eliminate or minimise these risks so far as is reasonably practicable. The UK HSE Management Standards include manager support and workplace relationships among their six risk areas.

So when an organisation runs a psychosocial risk assessment, supervisory behaviour belongs on both sides of the ledger. It is a hazard source and a control. When you put psychosocial hazards on your risk register, list it in both columns.

What does the research say about leaders and worker mental health?

The evidence has pointed the same way for decades.

A 2017 meta-analysis in the Journal of Organizational Behavior pooled studies on leadership and followers' mental health across six outcome groups, including burnout, stress and wellbeing. Supportive, relations-focused leadership and good-quality relationships between leaders and workers went with better mental health. Destructive leadership went with markedly worse mental health. The authors also found partial support for mental health as one route by which leadership affects job performance.

Safety research reaches the same place from a different direction. In a 2002 field experiment, Dov Zohar gave line supervisors weekly feedback, drawn from interviews with their own crews, on how often they raised safety in day-to-day interactions. The feedback made the priority of safety over speed and schedule explicit. Zohar's intervention groups had more safety conversations than before. Minor injury rates dropped, earplug use rose and safety climate scores improved. The control groups did not change.

For operations leaders, the lesson is practical. Change what supervisors pay attention to and talk about, and the injury data moves.

How do leaders shape psychological safety?

Psychological safety is a shared belief within a team that it is safe to take interpersonal risks: to speak up, question a decision, admit an error or report a near-miss without being punished or embarrassed. In high-risk operations it works as a human factors variable. It decides whether safety-critical information reaches the people who need it.

Psychological safety is a team condition. Psychosocial risk is a hazard category. The two are related, but they are two different things.

This is the concept Edmondson went on to develop from the hospital study above, and her finding holds up on site. When a new supervisor arrives and near-miss reports climb, the crew has usually become more honest, not less safe.

Todd Conklin captures the leadership side in one of his five principles of human performance: how you respond to failure matters. The first minute after something goes wrong tells the crew whether to raise the next problem or bury it. That is why human factors in high-risk operations starts with the conditions leaders create, and why HOP and workforce wellbeing belong together.

What does high-pressure leadership look like on the ground?

It rarely looks like bullying. It looks like ordinary behaviour under production pressure.

The supervisor who works 16-hour days and calls it commitment sets the standard for the crew. A fatigue disclosure met with "we're all tired" turns fatigue management into a paperwork exercise. After an event, the first question is who, not what made the task hard. Stop-work authority exists on paper, but the last person who used it got a hard time at the next toolbox talk.

Each of these behaviours makes sense to the leader in the moment. Each one strips information out of the system. The crew stops reporting, and the organisation loses sight of the risk until it turns into an incident.

Which leadership wellbeing competencies hold up in the field?

Generic frameworks list traits. High-risk operations need a short set of behaviours that a crew can see and an organisation can check.

• Knowing the crew's normal. Leaders who know how each person usually sounds and works can spot the drift: someone quiet on the radio, skipping meals, making small slips.

• Short, regular check-ins. Two minutes at the pre-start, asked in a way that makes "not great today" an acceptable answer.

• Responding to bad news with a question. "What made that hard?" comes before "Who did it?" The response decides whether the next report arrives.

• Acting on fatigue and workload signals. Moving a tired operator off a critical task, calling a stop, escalating a roster problem. Action is what proves the check-in was real.

• Modelling limits. Taking breaks, handing over properly and going off shift when relieved.

• Closing the loop on wellbeing data. When team results come back, telling the crew what was found and what will change.

Every item on that list can be observed. That makes each one trainable and auditable, which "emotional intelligence" on a competency matrix is not.

Why does generic leadership training miss the mark?

Off-the-shelf programmes assume an office. A manager with eight direct reports, a meeting room and a quiet week to practise new habits. A drilling supervisor might have 30 people across two shifts, a stack of permits and a crew that changes every rotation.

That mismatch matters, but a deeper problem sits underneath it. Training treats leadership behaviour as a gap in the person. Much of it is a work design problem. A supervisor who spends half the shift on paperwork has no time for check-ins, however good the course was. Conklin's principle that context drives behaviour applies to leaders as much as to the people they lead.

Wellbeing-grounded safety training starts with the job, then the person. Give supervisors the time, span of control and backing to lead. Otherwise you are training people to do something the roster does not allow.

How can organisations measure leadership as a wellbeing factor?

Measure at team level, against the leader's own crew, and favour leading indicators over lagging ones.

The useful signals are crew perceptions of supervisor support and fairness, near-miss and hazard reporting rates by crew, fatigue disclosures and stop-work calls, turnover intent and actual attrition by supervisor, and absence patterns after roster changes. Read together over time, they show which crews have leaders who absorb pressure and which have leaders who pass it down.

Anonymity needs protecting. Our diagnostic tools never report a group of fewer than five people, so small crews are combined before results reach anyone.

The Six Drivers Organisational Diagnostic scores Leadership and Relationships as one of six system conditions. The drivers are adapted from Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and George Ward's Oxford research and mapped to ISO 45003, with the leadership driver tied to the standard's clause on leadership and worker participation. Paired with leader interviews and a review of rosters and policies, the diagnostic shows where supervisory behaviour is carrying risk and where it is holding the system together. For more on turning that data into decisions, see measuring wellbeing in operations.

How do you hold leaders accountable without creating a blame culture?

Start with what goes in the KPI. Tie a supervisor's bonus to their crew's wellbeing score and the score will improve. The risk may not. Injury rates went the same way once TRIR became a target, which is why we argue for counting capacity, not injuries.

Hold leaders to the inputs they control: check-ins held, issues escalated, actions taken on diagnostic results, reports handled without blame. Review team outcomes as information for a conversation, not as a scorecard.

Hold leaders accountable for what they do, and give them what they need to do it. Accountability without capability is just another pressure.

Leaders need support of their own. Supervisors in remote and rotational roles face the same hazards as their crews, plus the weight of the calls they make. A supervisor running on four hours' sleep has little capacity left to notice anyone else. Build relief, peer contact and their own check-ins into the system.

How do leadership pressures differ across maritime, mining and oil and gas?

The principles hold across sectors. The pressure points differ.

Leadership and wellbeing in maritime

A vessel master carries a kind of isolation few shore roles match. The nearest peer may be an ocean away, and the company is a satellite link. Crews are often multinational, which brings language gaps and different expectations about challenging someone senior. A junior officer may watch an error unfold rather than question the master.

Maritime already treats leadership as a formal competence. The STCW Convention requires officers to demonstrate leadership and teamworking skills. The emphasis sits on bridge and engine room resource management, though, not on the psychological health of the crew. Long contracts add another layer. A master can absorb crew strain for months with no relief and no one to hand it to. A maritime wellbeing programme that ignores the people in command misses the pressure point that shapes everyone else's.

Leadership and wellbeing in mining and oil and gas

FIFO and rotational rosters fragment leadership. A supervisor builds trust with a crew over a swing, then the crew disperses and reforms with different people. Trust has to be rebuilt every time. Back-to-back supervisors hand over mid-issue, and wellbeing concerns are often the first thing lost at handover.

Remote site leaders work under production targets, regulatory scrutiny and thin support nearby. Many were promoted for technical ability and then left to learn people leadership on the job. Parts of both industries have long rewarded toughness, which makes it hard for a leader to model the behaviour a crew needs to see. The FIFO workforce mental health picture includes supervisors, not only the people they manage. The same holds for psychosocial risk in mining operations more broadly.

What does good leadership wellbeing practice look like?

Picture a shift supervisor at the pre-start. She asks how people slept before she runs through the job plan. She asks what is getting in the way today and writes it down. After a near-miss, she thanks the person who reported it in front of the crew, then asks what made the task hard. She moves a fatigued operator off a critical lift without fuss and tells the superintendent the roster caused it. When her relief arrives, she goes home.

None of this needs a different personality. It needs time in the shift, a manager who backs the calls, and data that shows where the pressure sits. That is organisational work, and it belongs to the people who design rosters, set targets and write position descriptions. Here is how Wellbeing Daily supports high-risk organisations to do it.

Leadership behaviour is the most visible psychosocial control in any high-risk operation. Specify it, resource it, measure it and review it like any other critical control.

Frequently asked questions

What is the relationship between leadership behaviour and workplace wellbeing?

Leadership behaviour is both a source of psychosocial risk and one of the main controls for it. ISO 45003 lists leadership among the social factors that can create psychosocial hazards. Research consistently links supportive leadership with better worker mental health and destructive leadership with worse. In high-risk industries, leaders also decide, through their reactions, whether fatigue, errors and near-misses get reported.

How does psychological safety connect to safety performance in high-risk industries?

Psychological safety decides whether workers raise concerns, admit mistakes and report near-misses. Where it is high, problems surface earlier and risk gets fixed before it becomes an incident. Amy Edmondson's hospital research found that better-led units recorded more errors, because people there were more willing to report them. A rise in reporting is often a sign of health.

What wellbeing competencies should leaders in mining, maritime or oil and gas develop?

In our experience, six observable behaviours matter most: knowing the crew's normal, holding short regular check-ins, responding to bad news with a question rather than blame, acting on fatigue and workload signals, modelling limits, and closing the loop on wellbeing data. Each one can be trained, observed and audited.

Can leadership behaviour be measured as a wellbeing risk factor?

Yes. Measure it at team level using crew perceptions of supervisor support and fairness, reporting rates, fatigue disclosures, turnover intent and absence patterns, tracked over time by crew. Protect anonymity by reporting only groups of five or more. Combine diagnostic data with leader interviews and a review of rosters and policies for a full picture.

Why do standard leadership development programmes fail in safety-critical environments?

They assume office conditions and treat leadership as a skills gap in the individual. In high-risk operations, work design shapes much of a leader's behaviour: span of control, admin load, rosters and production targets. Training without changing those conditions asks leaders to do something the job does not allow.

How can organisations hold leaders accountable for workforce wellbeing without creating blame cultures?

Hold leaders to inputs they control, such as check-ins held, issues escalated and actions taken on diagnostic results, rather than to their team's wellbeing score. Outcome targets invite score management instead of risk management. Pair accountability with time, training and support for leaders' own wellbeing.

What is the business case for investing in leadership wellbeing capability in high-risk sectors?

Leader behaviour controls the information an operation runs on. Zohar's field experiment found that changing how supervisors engaged with safety reduced minor injury rates. A 2017 meta-analysis linked leadership quality with worker mental health and, partly through it, with job performance. The same behaviours support earlier reporting of risk and help retain experienced crews.

Sources

• Conklin, T. (2019). The 5 Principles of Human Performance.

• De Neve, J.-E. and Ward, G. (2025). Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters. Harvard Business Review Press.

• Edmondson, A. C. (1996). Learning from mistakes is easier said than done: Group and organizational influences on the detection and correction of human error. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 32(1), 5-28.

• Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.

• ISO 45003:2021. Occupational health and safety management: Psychological health and safety at work. Guidelines for managing psychosocial risks.

• Montano, D., Reeske, A., Franke, F. and Hüffmeier, J. (2017). Leadership, followers' mental health and job performance in organizations: A comprehensive meta-analysis from an occupational health perspective. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 38(3), 327-350.

• Safe Work Australia (2022). Model Code of Practice: Managing psychosocial hazards at work.

• Zohar, D. (2002). Modifying supervisory practices to improve subunit safety: A leadership-based intervention model. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(1), 156-163.