SafetyInsights.org

ABSTRACT

Employees’ engagement in safety is assumed to be a significant contributor to safety performance within the chemical industry. The current study tested this assumption by examining the role of prosocial safety behaviors (e.g., helping others) and proactive safety behaviors (e.g., seeking change) in predicting four safety performance outcomes: micro-accidents, property damage (accidents without injury), near-miss events, and lost-time injuries.

Two-wave data collected from 511 employees located in 2 Italian chemical plants revealed that prosocial safety behaviors predicted micro-accidents and property damage, and proactive safety behaviors predicted near-miss events and lost-time injuries. These results suggest that benefits can be gained from distinguishing between prosocial and proactive safety behaviors when seeking to improve safety performance.

Organizations may reduce the rate of minor injuries and property damage by increasing helping among employees. However, this approach will be less effective in reducing more serious accidents or increasing near-miss event reporting. More effective in these cases is creating environments in which employees feel able to raise their suggestions and concerns about safety.

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** Note – this used internal measures of micro-accidents, property damage, lost time injuries, and near-misses to correlate with the pro-social data. So caveat emptor.

Specific findings from the full-text paper:

·        Prosocial safety behaviors (e.g. helping team members with their safety responsibilities) predict micro-accidents and property damage.

·        Proactive safety behaviors (e.g. raising suggestions for safety improvement) predict lost-time injuries and near-miss event reporting.

The authors’ suggest that interventions to improve organisational safety performance should target the specific behaviours of interest. If micro-accidents or property damage reductions are sought, then focussing on promoting helping among co-workers.

Both approaches – prosocial and proactive – play an important role in promoting safety, it’s noted that “interventions or training initiatives that focus too heavily on the entire class of behaviors, or on those behaviors unrelated to the outcome, may observe minimal improvements” (p321).

The authors provide other suggestions for organisations to promote prosocial and proactive behaviours by:

• “investing in communication strategies that focus on rewarding employees for going above and beyond mandatory safety behaviors. A public reward system for raising suggestions about safety, for example, would provide employees with a visible demonstration of commitment from management when they offer meaningful feedback, and would reduce perceptions of risk associated with these behaviors” (pg. 321).
• “reinforcing and increasing levels of autonomy and self-determination in carrying out duties and/or promoting, where appropriate, action in favor of safety through appropriate incentive systems (Gagné and Panaccio, 2014; Strauss and Parker, 2014). In this way, organizations may make employees aware that they are not only expected to react to top-down management safety systems in the workplace, but that they may engage in bottom-up initiatives through their participation in safety. As such, they may help the organization to manage grey areas—those areas that may not be easily managed with the ordinary and formalized safety systems and procedures.” (pg. 322)
• “prosocial behaviors may be effectively promoted by focusing on the social aspects of teamwork (Parker, 2014). This may include reinforcing interdependence, cohesion, and peer-to-peer communication; which serve to enhance affiliative motivation, mutual trust and positive psychological atmosphere in the workgroup” (pg. 322).

Some research limitations were noted. Of note is that this study focussed on the Italian chemical industry and thus it is difficult to say if these results can be generalised to other contexts.

Authors: Curcuruto, M., Conchie, S.M., Mariani, M.G., & Violante, F.S. (2015). Safety Science, 80:317–323.

Study link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2015.07.032

Link to the LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:6924147810363748353?updateEntityUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afs_updateV2%3A%28urn%3Ali%3AugcPost%3A6924147810363748353%2CFEED_DETAIL%2CEMPTY%2CDEFAULT%2Cfalse%29