How safety leadership works among owners, contractors and subcontractors in construction projects

•This paper interprets how safety leadership works among stakeholders in construction projects.•Relationships among different project stakeholders' safety leaderships are distinct and targeted.•Among all leadership dimensions, safety influence and role modeling has the widest range of influence on other stakeholders.•Charismatic and caring behaviors of safety leaders are particularly effective in the frontline environment.•There are close interactions between safety leadership and safety culture in construction projects.

Leadership is a key factor impacting construction safety, but previous research merely investigated the single-level relationship between safety leadership and safety performance and ignored the leadership interaction between different project stakeholders. To fill this gap, this paper aims to examine the relationships between safety leaderships of project owners, contractors and subcontractors and discover leadership dimensions which significantly impact construction safety performance. An impacting mechanism involving owner safety leadership, contractor safety leadership and subcontractor safety leadership are hypothetically proposed and empirically tested. The results show that significant relationships exist between safety leaderships of the three key stakeholders. Project safety culture acts as a significant mediator in these relationships. In addition, among all leadership dimensions of owners and contractors, safety influence and role modeling has the widest range of influence on project safety culture and other stakeholders' safety leadership. As such, it is suggested that owners and contractors should cultivate charisma and the ability of being influential about ideals in project managers and require them to behave as role models for others. The results also show that the caring dimension of leadership is more required in the frontline environment. Supervisors need more attention and support from the contractor in their well-being and organizational identification for the project. In conclusion, this paper establishes clear leadership impacting paths from owners to site supervisors of subcontractors in construction projects, which provides insights into effective ways to implement managerial measures and publicize policies and values to construction sites.