Despite the growing body of literature on the salience of leadership for workplace safety, questions have been raised concerning leadership effectiveness mostly because extent literature remains largely oblivious to the context in which the leader-follower relationship operates. The current study looks to address this shortcoming in the safety literature by aligning the characteristics of leaders with the context in which they operate. We develop a typology to explain the type of leaders more likely to succeed at ensuring workplace safety in specific contexts. We also analyze major findings of literature on the leadership-safety relationship and propose potentially significant but overlooked avenues of research for a more comprehensive understanding of this relationship. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd