**7. Empirical research–methodology**

#### **7.1. Measuring instrument**

Leaders impact safety and health behavior of employees in two fields. First, leaders shape organizational process and management sub‐systems; thus, they control various health‐related physical and psycho‐sociological characteristics of the work and working environment. Second, leaders influence employees' safety behavior and health through day‐to‐day direct

Health‐promoting leadership culture combines various leadership styles and behaviors to

Leaders can create workplaces that enhance health, if they can recognize and reduce mis‐ matches between employees and their organization. Mismatches can occur in six areas of work

WHP is aimed to have physically and mentally healthy employees. Employees should gain also their psychological well‐being, including positive (social) relations with others [49]. One's well‐being depends on warm, rewarding and trustworthy relationships with other people, concerns about the well‐being of others, the ability of empathy, affection and intimacy, and understanding the giving and receiving components of human relationships. These attributes can be developed with WPH: the Law on Safety and Health at Work [1] exposes that leaders should develop and implement each activity for generating safety and health at work in

**•** Provision of relevant information to employees and the preparation of the communication

**•** Organization of work tasks and processes in terms of the positive impact on health; and

The first hypothesis therefore considers positive (social) relations with others:

**•** Respect and implement measures to ensure their safety and health at work;

*H1: Leaders and employees established positive (social) relations with others.*

**•** Introduction and implementation of policies and practices, which enhance employee

Furthermore, the Law on Safety and Health at Work [1] says that leaders must ensure health and safety at work, hence prepare, plan and implement activities, and consult with employees about the mentioned activities, including informing employees about activities. On the other

Let us finish the summary of the theoretical bases of research that we report about here.

and personal interaction and communication [46].

life [48]: workload, control, reward, community, fairness and values.

cooperation with employees. Such relations could be developed through:

**•** Involvement of employees in the decision‐making process;

**•** Preparation of the work culture based on partnership;

design healthy workplaces [47].

86 Occupational Health

**6. Hypotheses development**

strategy;

relations.

hand, employees must:

We used the questionnaire entitled health‐promoting leadership culture, developed by Jiménez et al. [50]. It can detect attitudes and behavior regarding health‐promoting leadership culture with seven dimensions: health awareness, low workload, control, reward, community, fairness and values. There are two versions: a self‐assessment version for leaders, and an external assessment version for employees. Thus, leaders can evaluate their own style of healthy leadership, while employees can evaluate the extent of healthy leadership culture of their superiors. The questionnaire HPLC has 44 items, and can be answered on a 7‐step scale, from "never" to "always."

#### **7.2. Procedure**

Data were collected using a quantitative survey within a cross‐cultural project. The online study took place on the 9th to 19th July, 2013.1 Participants were required to have a job with at least 10 working hours per week and have colleagues at work. The workers categorized themselves with respect to their position in the company as leaders or employees.

#### **7.3. Data collecting and participants**

All‐in‐all, 292 respondents from Slovenia answered the questions about HPLC. The respond‐ ents chose an appropriate category, i.e., a description of the frequency of the HPLC in their working day from the viewpoint of leaders or employees. The leaders answered how often they pay attention to HPLC in their working day, and the employees answered how often their leaders do so in their working day. Although there were some missing values in the database, the number of responses to each question was sufficient to apply the data analysis methods listed in the next section.

<sup>1</sup> Data were collected within the project "Culture4leadership," funded by the Province of Styria, Austria, within the framework of "Grenz‐frei" (i.e. "no border") project.

Out of the 292 respondents who answered the questions about HPLC, 74 (25.3%) were classified as leaders and 218 (74.7%) as employees.

#### **7.4. Statistics**

The collected data were processed with the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS; Version 21). As the variables are ordinal, the median was used to measure the central tendency. We also displayed the frequency tables. As the collected data were measured on an ordinal scale, the independent samples Mann‐Whitney U test that is the nonparametric equivalent to the parametric independent samples t‐test (for example, see [51, 52])was used to verify the null hypothesis: The distribution of the workers' HPLC is the same across categories of position in the company.
