COVID-19 safety leadership, perceived severity, and emotional exhaustion: Does safety culture matter?

Emotional exhaustion is a major health-related issue that employees face, especially during crises such as pandemics. This study seeks to understand how safety leadership applied to the COVID-19 pandemic relates to emotional exhaustion, and to examine its mechanisms (i.e., perceived severity) along with its boundary condition (i.e., safety culture).

A time lag study was conducted to collect data from 229 employees working in the service industry in Morocco. Data were analyzed through the Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) technique using SmartPLS 4.

The results demonstrate that safety leadership is negatively related to emotional exhaustion. Additionally, they suggest that the relationship between COVID-19 safety leadership and perceived severity depends on the level of the moderating variable (i.e., safety culture). Specifically, the relationship is positive when safety culture is low, but is negative when safety culture is high.

The results of this study are important as they extend our knowledge of the nature of safety leadership and emotional exhaustion, and offer managers practical implications that can help to optimize safety leadership practices.