Personality and Workplace Safety
Safety, a personality issue?
Workplace safety has become a primary concern in many organizations. New laws are being enforced and more and more companies are participating in Health and Safety courses which allow them to promote a safe and healthy workplace environment amongst their staff. Yet every year work-related injuries and diseases cause nearly 1,000 deaths in companies and organizations. Many experts have begun linking these incidents to personality. Find out how safety can be a personality issue and how HR practices can help reduce workplace incidents.
All Canadians are entitled to work in a healthy and safe environment, yet every year work-related injuries and diseases cause nearly 1,000 deaths in companies and organizations under federal or provincial jurisdiction(Human Resources and Skills Development Canada).
In the U.S., National Safety Council figures for the year 1999 showed that industrial accidents cost industry $123 billion dollars in quantifiable losses. These figures do not take in to account such factors as lowered moral and the cost of re-training individuals to take the place of absent workers due to accidents. More importantly, workers killed on the job leave behind families, friends, and co-workers.
Other negative outcomes attend workplace accidents as well. According to Barling, Kelloway, and Iverson (2003), workplace accidents result in a perceived lack of influence and a distrust of management, with the former also affecting the distrust of management. Both of these factors predicted job dissatisfaction which, in turn, was negatively related to turnover intentions and voice (perceptions of union instrumentality).
By all accounts, the single most common cause of workplace accidents is complacency—an attitude that “It won’t happen to me.” In fact, a considerable amount of research shows that human error underlies a full 80% of all industrial accidents and injuries. Too often, employees are not attentive to their work environments. They become convinced that management is not concerned about safety and begin to think that they are not responsible for their own safety. The result is that employees begin to get in a hurry and take shortcuts on the job. They are more focused on production and getting the job done than getting it done safely.
Selecting and developing employees is critical in sustaining occupational safety excellence. Once a new employee enters the workplace, most organizations deploy mechanisms to ensure they are assimilated into the cultural norms and performance expectations in an efficient and effective manner. However, too often this process of acculturation for new hires does not promote a complimentary safety mentality.
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, organizations have continued to enhance their pre-employment practices. Recent additions have included background checks (personal, professional, criminal, credit), reviewing driving history, assessments of competency (demonstrable knowledge, behaviours, and skills required to perform specific tasks) and personality profiling (tests to determine character, patterns of Behaviour, thoughts and attitudes).
Individual personality drives behaviour, but this is often the forgotten component in safety programs. Research shows that some employees tend to engage in unsafe behaviour at work due to carelessness, recklessness, rebelliousness, and other reasons. Needless to say, these behaviours increase the possibility of on-the-job accidents. For example, in an early review of the research relating personality traits to industrial accidents, Hansen (1988) concluded that personality traits such as extroversion, impulsivity, aggression, social maladjustment, and some aspects of neurosis are related to the occurrence of accidents. Similarly, Hansen (1989) found that social maladjustment and distractibility were found to be significant causes of accidents.
In 2001, Cellar reported significant relationships between workplace accidents and personality variables such as the lack of agreeability and a tendency to oversee rules and regulations. In all these cases, the results on standardized valid and reliable psychometric tests were capable of predicting certain types of workplace accidents. These results were confirmed in a latter study also done by Cellar (2004).
Overall, it is thus possible to identify some personality factors that will have an influence on health and safety in the workplace. One of the tests we are using, better known as the TACT (French acronym for the Test d’approche et de Comportement au Travail or the Work Approach and Behaviour Test), measures many of the variables identified in the professional and scientific literature on the subject. In our opinion, it is thus possible to conduct a preliminary study which would lead to a better identification of people (potential workers) presenting a higher health and safety risk.
Of course, unsafe work behaviour is not a unitary concept—several distinct themes underlie this behaviour. However, it is possible to use a valid personality measure to decrease the risks.
By: Larry Coutts
References:
Barling, J., Kelloway, E. K., & Iverson, R. D. (2003). Accidental outcomes: Attitudinal consequences of workplace injuries. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 8(1), 74-85.
Cellar, D. F., Nelson, Z. C., Yorke, C. M., & Bauer, C. (2001). The five-factor model and safety in the workplace: Investigating the relationships between personality and accident involvement. Journal of Prevention & Intervention in the Community, 22 (1), 43-52.
Cellar, D.F., Yorke, C.M., Nelson, Z.C., & Carroll, K.A. (2004). Relationships between five factor personality variables, workplace accidents, and self-efficacy. Psychological Reports, 94(3), 1437-1441
Hansen, C.P. (1988). Personality characteristics of the accident involved employee. Journal of Business and Psychology, 2(4), 346-365.
Hansen, C. P. (1989). A causal model of the relationship among accidents, biodata, personality, and cognitive factors. Journal of Applied Psychology, 74(1), 81-90.
