When technology awakens willingness but stalls action: the asymmetric psychological translation of managerial safety cognition.

Why does managerial prioritization of safety more readily correspond to frontline willingness than to frontline action? Drawing on upper echelons theory, the attention-based view, and organizational psychology research on the attitude-behavior gap, this study examines whether managerial safety cognition is associated with frontline safety outcomes through three organizational mechanisms: institutionalization, technological affordance, and team safety climate. Using multi-source, time-lagged data from 183 firms and 667 nested teams in Chinese high-risk industries, this study estimated random-intercept multilevel models and used supervisor-rated behavior for cross-source validation. Managerial safety cognition was positively associated with all three organizational mechanisms. Institutionalization and team safety climate were, in turn, associated with both safety motivation and safety participation. Technological affordance was associated with safety motivation but not safety participation, and formal coefficient comparison tests confirmed that this asymmetry was statistically significant. Performance pressure further bounded behavioral translation in an inverted-U pattern consistent with the job demands-resources model: moderate pressure strengthened, whereas excessive pressure weakened, the behavioral relevance of organizational mechanisms. The findings support an attentional-prioritization account in which top-level safety priorities reach the frontline through differentiated organizational pathways rather than through a single leadership-signal channel. Practically, the findings suggest that digital safety systems should be paired with formal accountability and team-level support if motivational readiness is to translate into proactive safety behavior.