Jeremy M. Beus

Safety climate and injuries: an examination of theoretical and empirical relationships.

Our purpose in this study was to meta-analytically address several theoretical and empirical issues regarding the relationships between safety climate and injuries. First, we distinguished between extant safety climate-->injury and injury-->safety climate relationships for both organizational and psychological safety climates. Second, we examined several potential moderators of these relationships. Meta-analyses revealed that injuries were more predictive of organizational safety climate than safety climate was predictive of injuries. Additionally, the injury-->safety climate relationship was stronger for organizational climate than for psychological climate. Moderator analyses revealed that the degree of content contamination in safety climate measures inflated effects, whereas measurement deficiency attenuated effects. Additionally, moderator analyses showed that as the time period over which injuries were assessed lengthened, the safety climate-->injury relationship was attenuated. Supplemental meta-analyses of specific safety climate dimensions also revealed that perceived management commitment to safety is the most robust predictor of occupational injuries. Contrary to expectations, the operationalization of injuries did not meaningfully moderate safety climate-injury relationships. Implications and recommendations for future research and practice are discussed.

The Relationship Between Typical and Maximum Performance: A Meta-Analytic Examination

This studys purpose was to meta-analytically estimate the magnitude of the relationship between typical and maximum job performance to determine if this distinction deserves greater attention. We also tested several moderators including three associated with the temporal boundaries of this relationship and examined theoretical antecedents of typical and maximum performance (ability, motivation, and personality). This meta-analysis revealed a moderate typical–maximum performance association (ρ = .42), suggesting that a meaningful distinction does exist. Although the examined temporal moderators did not meaningfully affect the typical–maximum performance relationship, task complexity, type of performance measure, and study setting were significant moderators. Antecedent analyses confirmed that both ability and Openness to Experience are more strongly related to maximum than typical performance. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Workplace safety A review and research synthesis

Unsafe work environments have clear consequences for both individuals and organizations. As such, an ever-expanding research base is providing a greater understanding of the factors that affect workplace safety across organizational levels. However, despite scientific advances, the workplace safety literature suffers from a lack of theoretical and empirical integration that makes it difficult for organizational scientists to gain a comprehensive sense of (a) what we currently know about workplace safety and (b) what we have yet to learn. This review addresses these shortcomings. First, the authors provide a formal definition of workplace safety and then create an integrated safety model (ISM) based on existing theory to summarize current theoretical expectations with regard to workplace safety. Second, the authors conduct a targeted review of the safety literature and compare extant empirical findings with the ISM. Finally, the authors use the results of this review to articulate gaps between theory and research and then make recommendations for both theoretical and empirical improvements to guide and integrate future workplace safety research.

Almighty Dollar or Root of All Evil? Testing the Effects of Money on Workplace Behavior

Across cultures, the idea of money has dual positive and negative connotations. Consistent with this notion of duality, money-priming theory posits that the salience of money makes individuals work harder for themselves while also reducing the concern they have for others. Although research has tended to support these expectations, it has almost exclusively done so using between-persons designs in controlled lab settings. To address these limitations in the literature, we used a within-persons design in two work settings to test individual behavior change as a function of the salience of money. We did so using two samples of professional athletes and tested the extent to which priming individual pay affected both self-serving and cooperative behaviors. We operationalized the money prime in these samples as the final year of individuals’ employment contracts—a time when money is made particularly salient relative to surrounding years. Consistent with money-priming theory, within-persons analyses using a sample of basketball players from the National Basketball Association revealed that self-serving behaviors significantly increased in the final contract year relative to surrounding years. However, we did not find that cooperative behaviors decreased during the final contract year. This pattern of results was replicated using a sample of professional hockey players in the National Hockey League. These findings cumulatively suggest that although the salience of money is associated with increases in self-serving behaviors, it is not adversely associated with cooperation or team success.

Personality as a Multilevel Predictor of Climate An Examination in the Domain of Workplace Safety

Individual and aggregate personality traits are theoretical antecedents of psychological and workgroup climates, respectively. However, empirical research has yet to test whether or to what degree this is true. Consequently, in the domain of workplace safety, we tested emotional stability and locus of control as multilevel antecedents of safety climate. We also tested a series of homology theories to determine the degree to which personality–climate associations are similar across organizational levels. Results revealed that both emotional stability and locus of control were meaningfully associated with safety climate at psychological and workgroup levels. In addition, multilevel homology tests demonstrated that workgroup-level personality–climate associations were more than 2½ times stronger than corresponding individual-level associations, supporting a proportional theory of homology.

A Meta-Analysis of Sex and Race Differences in Perceived Workplace Mistreatment.

Despite the growing number of meta-analyses published on the subject of workplace mistreatment and the expectation that women and racial minorities are mistreated more frequently than men and Whites, the degree of subgroup differences in perceived workplace mistreatment is unknown. To address this gap in the literature, we meta-analyzed the magnitude of sex and race differences in perceptions of workplace mistreatment (e.g., harassment, discrimination, bullying, incivility). Results indicate that women perceive more sex-based mistreatment (i.e., mistreatment that explicitly targets a person’s sex) in the workplace than men (&dgr; = .46; k = 43), whereas women and men report comparable perceptions of all other forms of mistreatment (&dgr; = .02; k = 300). Similarly, although racial minorities perceive more race-based mistreatment (i.e., mistreatment that explicitly targets a person’s race) in the workplace than Whites (&dgr; = .71; k = 18), results indicate smaller race differences in all other forms of workplace mistreatment (&dgr; = .10; k = 61). Results also indicate that sex and race differences have mostly decreased over time, although for some forms of mistreatment, subgroup differences have increased over time. We conclude by offering explanations for the observed subgroup differences in workplace mistreatment and outline directions for future research.

The impact of the BP baker report

INTRODUCTION This study examined the impact of the British Petroleum (BP) Baker Panel Report, reviewing the March 2005 BP-Texas City explosion, on the field of process safety. METHOD Three hundred eighty-four subscribers of a process safety listserv responded to a survey two years after the BP Baker Report was published. RESULTS Results revealed respondents in the field of process safety are familiar with the BP Baker Report, feel it is important to the future safety of chemical processing, and believe that the findings are generalizable to other plants beyond BP-Texas City. Respondents indicated that few organizations have administered the publicly available BP Process Safety Culture Survey. Our results also showed that perceptions of contractors varied depending on whether respondents were part of processing organizations (internal perspective) or government or consulting agencies (external perspective). CONCLUSIONS This research provides some insight into the beliefs of chemical processing personnel regarding the transportability and generalizability of lessons learned from one organization to another. IMPACT ON INDUSTRY This study has implications for both organizational scientists and engineers in that it reveals perceptions about the primary mechanism used to share lessons learned within one industry about one major catastrophe (i.e., investigation reports). This study provides preliminary information about the perceived impact of a report such as this one.

Working safely at some times and unsafely at others: A typology and within-person process model of safety-related work behaviors.

Why do individuals choose to work safely in some instances and unsafely in others? Though this inherently within-person question is straightforward, the preponderance of between-person theory and research in the workplace safety literature is not equipped to answer it. Additionally, the limited way in which safety-related behaviors tend to be conceptualized further restricts understanding of why individuals vary in their safety-related actions. We use a goal-focused approach to conceptually address this question of behavioral variability and contribute to workplace safety research in 2 key ways. First, we establish an updated typology of safety-related behaviors that differentiates behaviors based on goal choice (i.e., safe vs. unsafe behaviors), goal-directedness (i.e., intentional vs. unintentional behaviors), and the means of goal pursuit (i.e., commission vs. omission and promotion vs. prevention-focused behaviors). Second, using an expectancy-value theoretical framework to explain variance in goal choice, we establish within-person propositions stating that safety-related goal choice and subsequent behaviors are a function of the target of safety-related behaviors, the instrumentality and resource requirement of behaviors, and the perceived severity, likelihood, and immediacy of the threats associated with behaviors. Taken together, we define what safety-related behaviors are, explain how they differ, and offer propositions concerning when and why they may vary within-persons. We explore potential between-person moderators of our theoretical propositions and discuss the practical implications of our typology and process model of safety-related behavior.

The Development and Validation of a Cross-Industry Safety Climate Measure: Resolving Conceptual and Operational Issues

Although safety climate research has increased in recent years, persisting conceptual ambiguity not only raises questions about what safety climate really is—as operationalized in the literature—but also inhibits increased scientific understanding of the construct. Consequently, using climate theory and research as a conceptual basis, we inductively articulated safety climate’s general content domain by identifying seven core indicators of safety’s perceived workplace priority: leader safety commitment, safety communication, safety training, coworker safety practices, safety equipment and housekeeping, safety involvement, and safety rewards. These indicators formed the basis for a generalized safety climate measure that we designed for use across organizations, industries, and construct levels. We then conducted a multilevel construct validation of safety climate using the newly created measure in two separate studies. Results from five samples spanning multiple organizations, industries, and cultural settings revealed that the identified safety climate indicators were parsimoniously explained by an overarching safety climate factor at the individual and workgroup levels. In addition, multilevel homology tests indicated that safety climate’s associations with past safety incidents were nearly two times stronger at the workgroup level relative to the individual level, although this difference was not statistically significant. Finally, workgroup-level validity evidence demonstrated expected associations between safety climate and organization-reported pre- and postsurvey safety incidents. On the basis of this supportive evidence, we recommend that this conceptualization and measure of safety climate be adopted in research and practice to facilitate future scientific progress.