Promoting Workplace Safety

Worker illustrations by Storyset

“Each day, 6,300 people die as a result of occupational accidents or work-related disease — more than 2.3 million deaths per year” (Internal Labour Organization, 2022). New Zealand is no exception. According to WorkSafe New Zealand (2022), there were 31,869 work-related injuries resulting in more than a week away from work in 2021 alone. Thus, our research focuses on factors that organizations can utilize to improve workplace safety.

We are particularly interested in the influence of interpersonal factors such as mistreatment, workgroup-level factors such as supervisors, and organisational-level factors such as organisational climate on employee safety outcomes and accident reporting behaviours.

Book Chapter: Leadership and safety.

Chapter Authors: Jiang, L.,& Xu, X.
Year of Publication: 2022
Book Title: Handbook on Management and Employment Practice
Book Editors: Brough, P., Gardiner,E., & Daniels, K. 
Volume No.: 3
Page No.: 67-91
Book Series: Handbook Series in Occupational Health Sciences
Publishers: Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Abstract: Leadership is one of the key factors that determines workplace safety. This chapter provides a comprehensive review on a wide range of safety-related outcomes and safety leadership styles and summarizes five theoretical perspectives (i.e., social exchange theory, social learning theory, social information-processing theory, expectancy theory, and self-regulation theory) and the empirical evidence between safety leadership and employee safety-related outcomes. The review suggests that safety leadership significantly influences employee safety-related outcomes via multiple mediation mechanisms (e.g., safety climate, leader-member exchange) and under different conditions (e.g., safety climate, perceived risk). Given the critical role of leadership in workplace safety, scholars have also developed interventions to improve leadership behaviours and promote employee safety-related outcomes. Building on previous research, we highlight several promising future directions, including testing the distinctiveness and usefulness of different safety leadership styles, adopting a within-person approach to understand the relationships between safety leadership and safety-related outcomes, examining the dark side of safety leadership with regard to workplace safety, and investigating the reciprocal relationships between safety leadership and safety-related outcomes.

Safety climate and safety outcomes: A meta- analytic comparison of universal vs. industry-specific safety climate predictive validity.

Article Link | DOI:10.1080/02678373.2018.1457737

Authors: Jiang, L., Lavaysse, L. M., & Probst, T. M.
Year of Publication: 2019
Journal: Work & Stress
Volume No.: 33
Issue No.: 1
Page No.: 41-57
Abstract: Previous research has demonstrated that safety climate is a robust predictor of safety-related outcomes. However, there is little consensus about the optimal strategy to measure safety climate. One of the main issues has been whether safety climate measures should be universal or industry-specific. As such, this study was designed to examine the criterion-related validity of universal and industry-specific safety climate measures by conducting a meta-analytic comparison of their relationships with a variety of safety-related outcomes (i.e. safety behaviour, risk perceptions, accidents and injuries, and other adverse events). With 120 independent samples (N = 81,213), we found that the industry-specific safety climate measures displayed better predictive power when predicting safety behaviour and risk perceptions than the universal safety climate measures. On the other hand, the universal safety climate measures displayed better predictive power when predicting other adverse events (but not accidents and injuries) than the industry-specific safety climate measures. We discuss these findings in light of the intended use of organisational safety climate surveys.

Transformational and passive leadership as cross-level moderators of the relationship between safety knowledge, motivation, and safety participation.

Article Link | DOI:10.1016/j.jsr.2016.03.002

Authors: Jiang, L., & Probst, T. M.
Year of Publication: 2016
Journal: Journal of Safety Research
Volume No.: 57
Page No.: 27-32
Abstract: While safety knowledge and safety motivation are well-established predictors of safety participation, less is known about the impact of leadership styles on these relationships. The purpose of the current study was to examine whether the positive relationships between safety knowledge and motivation and safety participation are contingent on transformational and passive forms of safety leadership. Using multilevel modeling with a sample of 171 employees nested in 40 workgroups, we found that transformational safety leadership strengthened the safety knowledge-participation relationship, whereas passive leadership weakened the safety motivation-participation relationship. Under low transformational leadership, safety motivation was not related to safety participation; under high passive leadership, safety knowledge was not related to safety participation. These results are discussed in light of organizational efforts to increase safety-related citizenship behaviors.

Leader-member exchange: Moderating the health and safety outcomes of job insecurity.

Article Link | DOI:10.1016/j.jsr.2015.11.003

Authors: Probst, T. M., Jiang, L., & Graso, M.
Year of Publication: 2016
Journal: Journal of Safety Research
Volume No.: 56
Page No.: 47-56
Abstract: Despite the prevalence of income inequality in today’s society, research on the implications of income inequality for organizational research is scant. This study takes the first step to explore the contextual role of national- and state- level income inequality as a moderator in the relationship between individual-level job insecurity (JI) and burnout. Drawing from conservation of resource (COR) theory, we argue that income inequality at the country-level and state-level threatens one’s obtainment of object (i.e., material coping) and condition (i.e., nonmaterial coping) resources, thus serving as an environmental stressor exacerbating one’s burnout reactions to JI. The predicted cross-level interaction effect of income inequality was tested in 2 studies. Study 1 consisting of 23,778 individuals nested in 30 countries explored the moderating effect of country-level income inequality on the relationship between individual JI and exhaustion. Study 2 collected data from 402 employees residing in 48 states in the United States, and tested the moderating effect of state-level income inequality on the relationship between JI and burnout (i.e., emotional exhaustion and cynicism). Results of both studies converge to support the exacerbating role of higher-level income inequality on the JI -burnout relationship. Our findings contribute to the literature on psychological health disparities by exploring the contextual role of income inequality as a predictor of differential reactions to JI.

A multilevel examination of affective job insecurity climate on safety outcomes.

Article Link | DOI:10.1037/ocp0000014

Authors: Jiang, L., & Probst, T. M.
Year of Publication: 2016
Journal: Journal of Occupational Health Psychology
Volume No.: 21
Page No.: 366-377
Abstract: Previous research has established a causal link between individual perceptions of job insecurity and safety outcomes. However, whether job insecurity climate is associated with safety outcomes has not been studied. The purpose of the current study was to explore the main and cross-level interaction effects of affective job insecurity climate on safety outcomes, including behavioral safety compliance, reporting attitudes, workplace injuries, experienced safety events, unreported safety events, and accident underreporting, beyond individual affective job insecurity. With 171 employees nested in 40 workgroups, multilevel analyses revealed that the negative impacts of individual affective job insecurity on safety outcomes are exacerbated when they occur in a climate of high affective job insecurity. These results are interpreted in light of safety management efforts and suggest that efforts to create a secure climate within one’s workgroup may reap safety-related benefits. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)