Substantial data demonstrates that leaders play a critical role in shaping workplace safety, helping reduce the physical, psychological, and economic costs associated with unsafe work. However, this literature has relied heavily on employees’ broad perceptions of leadership styles (e.g., charismatic, transformational or transactional) to establish this evidence. This approach is problematic because each style encompasses many different behaviours and often conflates leaders’ actions with employees’ overall evaluations. As a result, the extent to which research can offer clear guidance on the specific behaviours leaders should adopt to improve workplace safety remains limited.
To address this limitation, the present study adopts a more fine-grained approach by focusing on a single, discrete leader behaviour: storytelling. We focus on storytelling as a signal of charisma (transmitting information in a symbolic, value-based, and emotional manner), as prior work demonstrates that stories are an emotionally laden form of communication that evoke strong imagery and empathy in recipients. Thus, we propose that storytelling will increase recipients’ perceptions of leader charisma. Moreover, given charismatic leaders are known to be effective because they inspire and motivate followers to transcend the status quo, we argue heightened perceptions of charisma will translate into stronger motivation to engage in safe behaviour. Finally, we investigate recipients’ need for affect (tendency to approach emotion-inducing situations and experience them) as a boundary condition for the expected positive effects of leader stories on recipients’ perceptions of charisma. Specifically, since stories are posited to increase perceived charisma by inducing emotions, we argue that the signalling effects of storytelling will be less pronounced among recipients low in need for affect, as they are less inclined to attend to and experience emotions.
To test our theorising, an experimental design will be used in which participants (recruited via Prolific) are randomly assigned to view either a story-based or informational safety video. After viewing the video, participants will complete a survey measuring perceived leader charisma, safety motivation, and need for affect.
This research has several potential contributions. First, it advances leadership theory by isolating storytelling as a specific antecedent of perceived charismatic leadership, addressing calls to disentangle the effects of different behavioural signals of charisma. Second, by investigating need for affect, we identify a potential boundary condition for the effectiveness of storytelling as a charismatic communication signal. In practice, the findings may suggest that incorporating storytelling into safety messages is a scalable, low-cost strategy for enhancing leaders’ motivational impact.