Adaptive leadership and safety citizenship behaviors in Pakistan: the roles of readiness to change, psychosocial safety climate, and proactive personality

Hira Salah Ud Din Khan; Muhmmmad Salman Chughtai; Zhiqiang Ma; Mingxing Li; Di He

doi:10.3389/fpubh.2023.1298428

Adaptive leadership and safety citizenship behaviors in Pakistan: the roles of readiness to change, psychosocial safety climate, and proactive personality

Front Public Health. 2024 Jan 26:11:1298428. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2023.1298428. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Hira Salah Ud Din Khan¹, Muhmmmad Salman Chughtai^{2

3}, Zhiqiang Ma¹, Mingxing Li^{1

4}, Di He¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Management, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, China.
² Faculty of Management Sciences, International Islamic University, Islamabad, Islamabad, Pakistan.
³ Managing People in Organizations, IESE Business School, University of Navarra, Barcelona, Spain.
⁴ Research Center for Green Development and Environmental Governance, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, China.

Abstract

Challenging times have put organizations in a perilous and chaotic state that demands immediate resolution and calls for effective leadership to help navigate out of the crisis. In this context, we focused on psychosocial safety climate theory to investigate the influence of adaptive leadership on safety citizenship behaviors by looking at the mediating effect of readiness to change and the moderating impact of psychosocial safety climate and proactive personality, particularly in the Pakistani healthcare sector. To test the hypotheses, the data were collected from 397 employees working in the healthcare sector of Pakistan at two different times. The results of this study supported the model. The moderated path analysis revealed that psychosocial safety climate strengthens the direct effect of adaptive leadership on readiness to change, whereas the moderating impact of a proactive personality also strengthens the relationship between readiness to change and safety citizenship behaviors. Similarly, both moderators significantly moderated the indirect impact of adaptive leadership on safety citizenship behaviors via readiness to change. To conclude, the present study has significant implications for organizations and practitioners in both steady and uncertain environments.

Keywords: adaptive leadership; healthcare; moderated mediation model; proactive personality; psychosocial safety climate; readiness to change; safety citizenship behavior.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Citizenship
Humans
Leadership*
Organizational Culture*
Pakistan
Personality

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This study acknowledges the support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71974082), the Jiangsu Funding Program for Excellent Postdoctoral Talent (2022ZB643, 2022ZB644, 2022ZB646, and 2023ZB759), and the National Foreign Expert Project (Foreign Youth Talent Program) (QN2023014006).