This looked at the relationship between OHS hazard vulnerability and supervisor support on occupational injuries and illness.
Survey data was received from >2k workers who were employed over 15hrs/week in a company with at least 5 employees and who had a direct supervisor. The usual limitations on cross sectional, self-reported survey data (e.g. recall and recency bias) applies.
Hazard exposure was measured on a seven-point scale for nine common workplace hazards, where vulnerability is the degree that people have perceived unmitigated hazard exposures. Supervisory support has been found in previous research to have a substantial impact on workplace safety.
Results
To no surprise, higher vulnerability and a lack of supervisor support were found to significantly increase the likelihood for a worker to receive physical injuries at work.
Specifically, “the risk of physical injury was at least 3.5 times higher among those experiencing both OHS vulnerability and a lack of supervisor support than individuals without OHS vulnerability and with a supportive direct supervisor” (p172).
Workers who experienced hazard vulnerability were at lower risk of a physical injury in instances of higher supervisor support.
Also found was that the effects of vulnerability and lack of supervisor support had an additive effect on injury risk such that the combined effect was statistically greater than if the two factors had been factored in isolation.
An example highlighted in the paper discussed how 50.3% of people who experienced policy and procedural vulnerability and had no supervisor support reported a physical injury in the preceding 12 months, whereas this was only 10.3% of people who where not vulnerable and had a supportive supervisor.
For supportive supervisors only, the difference was 16.1% reporting an injury versus 36.3% for those who did not. Similarly, 43.9% reported an injury where they believed that their supervisor wouldn’t act to protect them from an injury, which was 13.9% reporting an injury who did have a supervisor who would act to protect them from workplace injury.
It’s said that the importance of supervisor support is evident and this is particularly important in workplaces where procedures, hazard awareness, hazard mitigation and/or empowerment can’t sufficiently address risks. E.g. smaller businesses constrained by finances to use higher order controls (eliminating, substitution, engineering) may gain relatively more benefit from building supervisor capacities.
This can include building additional supervisor capacities, including domain-specific leadership skills and other hazard specific capabilities.
Authors: Basak Yanar, Morgan Lay, Peter M. Smith, 2019, Safety and Health at Work
Study link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shaw.2018.11.001
Link to the LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/interplay-between-supervisor-safety-support-health-work-hutchinson
SafetyInsights.org 