Trust and distrust in safety leadership: Qualities of importance

Safety performance as shown by incident trends and injury rates has been found to be linked with levels of trust in site-level personnel in the oil and gas sector. Therefore, a deeper understanding of trust and distrust development is vital to further improve safety. This study explored the most important to least important safety leadership qualities for trust and distrust formation in site-level employees. Building upon the work in the construction sector, this study explored views in a different sector, the oil and gas sector. A total of 59 UK oil and gas technicians participated in a paired comparison activity on trustworthiness qualities which created consistent rankings for trust and distrust. The rankings for distrust development were similar to those from the construction sector with honesty being the most important quality. However, trust rankings differed for the oil and gas sector since care was most influential, rather than honesty. This is consistent with the stability in the oil and gas sector enabling effective communication of care towards team members and a leader demonstrating openness to listen to team members views. The top four qualities for trust development were the same as those for distrust which supports the view that trust and distrust are a single construct at opposite ends of a continuum, rather than separate constructs implying that strategies to support trust can also reduce distrust.