Leadership and Management Commitment - Research Paper Example

Leadership and Management Commitment Leadership and Management Commitment Introduction According to Burns (2002), the role played by an organization’s management is vital in as far as achieving and sustaining a safe place of work. A number of benchmarking studies identify leadership and management commitment as being fundamental towards the attainment of outstanding safety performance within an organization. The formation and maintenance of a safety culture within an organization therefore calls for a strong commitment and leadership by an organization’s senior management.

This implies that the attitude of an organization’s senior management has to be demonstrated in ways that reveal their practicality so that everyone who is concerned is assured of its commitment (Burns, 2002). Without leadership and management commitment, the organization is destined to fail.Mannan and Lees (2005) highlights that some of the ways in which leadership and management commitment is demonstrated include providing safety a high profile, giving the organization managers safety goals, supporting organization managers whose main concern is safety as far as their decision making is concerned, operating an active audit system and take action in cases of deficiencies and incidents.

Mannan and Lees (2005) argues that safety ought to be given a high profile and this can only be possible when various measures are put in place in addition to considering safety as the first item on the agenda of the organization’s meetings and also making sure that all the employees are informed of the actions taken by the management both in the initiation of, as well as in response to various safety matters.Burns (2002) argues that today’s organizational managers are generally aware of the significance of safety, including grave incident prevention.

However; a great number of them are normally overwhelmed by the pressure to attain excellence in a number of key areas of performances within their organizations. Other than safety operations, their attentions as organizational leaders are normally focused on productivity, customer service, product quality and cost control. To complicate things further, these goals more often than not appear to be tension with each other, with organizational managers finding it difficult to improve performance in one particular area without adversely impacting on the others.

It is therefore a workplace reality that dignified intentions by organizational managers are not enough to attain desired results within organization, and as a result managers ought to demonstrate effective leadership and management commitment by utilizing well the organization’s limited resources so as to achieve what is expected (Mannan & Lees,2005,Pp1).According to Burns (2002,Pp39) therefore, an organizations initiatives dependent upon the creation of new habits require both management leadership and effective strategy.

Conclusion Leadership and management commitment is no doubt fundamental towards the attainment of outstanding safety performance within an organization. Sustaining a safe place of work requires leadership and management commitment. Leadership is significant in transforming various concepts into particular actions that are required for the attainment of desired objectives. On the other hand, in order to sustain a common focus within the organization, the management should lead the organization by identifying as well as taking actions that are critical in as far as maintaining the prevention of incidents as a key objective.

ReferencesBurns, T. (2002). Serious Incident Prevention: How to Achieve and Sustain Accident-Free Operations in your Plant or Company, 2nd Edition. Gulf Professional Publishing, 2002.Mannan, S. & Lees, F., (2005) Lee’s Loss Prevention in the Process Industries: Hazard Identification, Assessment, and Control, Vol.1, 3rd Edition. Elsevier.