Military Digital Safety Management System and Resilient Safety Climate: The Roles of Safety Resilience and Mid-level Resilient Safety Leadership

This study examines how safety performance (SP) in military organizations operating under the Military Digital Safety Management System (MDSMS) is shaped by the resilient safety climate (RSC), emphasizing safety resilience (SR) as a mediating capability and mid-level resilient safety leadership (MRSL) as a conditional moderator. Drawing on resilience engineering (RE) and the Safety-II perspective, the study investigates how RSC translates into improved SP through adaptive organizational mechanisms. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was applied to data from 1,425 military personnel participating in a multi-year safety training program. Results show that SR partially mediates the relationship between RSC and SP, while the moderating and moderated-mediation effects of MRSL emerge only when MRSL exceeds a critical threshold (≥ 2.0692). These findings highlight SR as an essential adaptive capability for achieving safety success in complex military settings and position MRSL as a strategic leadership construct that enables resilient, behavior-based safety execution. Overall, this study advances an integrated RSC–SR–MRSL framework tailored for digitally enabled military environments and underscores the importance of enhancing MDSMS as a foundational infrastructure for resilience-oriented safety management.