etween the leader and every follower rather than being just a one-way process from leader towards followers (Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995).
Research has shown the potential positive effect of leadership style and LMX on performance. Transformational leadership was found to be associated with positive behaviours like learning (Raes, Lismont, Decupyer, & van den Bossche, 2013; Garcia-Morales, Jimenez-Barrionuevo, & Gutierrez-Gutierrez, 2012) and innovation (Garcia-Morales, Jimenez-Barrionuevo, & Gutierrez-Gutierrez, 2012; Gumusluoglu & Ilsev, 2009) but less is researched on transactional leadership’s impact. Moreover, LMX was shown to be a mediator in the relationship between transformational leadership and organisational citizenship behaviour (Wang, Law, Hackett, Wang, & Chen, 2005) but it is not clear whether a similar phenomenon is also valid for the transactional leadership.
Societal and Scientific value
Given the impact that psychological safety has on teams’ performance outcomes, it is undoubtedly crucial for health care. Thus, gaining insight into how leadership influences psychological safety is valuable. Being a transactional or a transformational leader is not a label that a leader is keeping regardless of situations and/or followers but rather a set of behaviours that are influenced by contextual factors and that build a relationship between leader and follower (Glynn & DeJordy, 2010). Therefore understanding how leader-member interactions nurtured by transformational, respectively transactional, leadership influence team psychological safety is resourceful. Not only will it increase the current knowledge on the relationship between leadership and team psychological safety, but it will also be helpful for informing strategies aimed at enhancing leaders’ practices for fostering psychological safety.