Moderation in all things, except when it comes to workplace safety: Accidents are most likely to occur under moderately hazardous work conditions

Abstract

In this article, we argue that the relationship between workplace hazardousness and accidents is best characterized as an inverted-U, such that accidents are most likely to occur within moderately hazardous environments. Specifically, whereas highly hazardous work environments are strong situations in which there is a clear need for a high degree of safety behavior, the amount of safety behavior needed to minimize accidents within moderately hazardous environments is more ambiguous. Drawing on self-regulatory theories of work motivation, we argue that most individuals tend to exhibit a proportional response to hazardousness, such that moderately hazardous environments are met with a moderate degree of safety behavior. However, we demonstrate that proportional responses to hazardousness will ultimately yield an inverted-U relationship between hazardousness and accidents. Instead, a sharp, non-linear increase in safety behavior is needed to keep accidents at a low and constant level as hazardousness increases. We present four studies to test our hypotheses. Studies 1 and 2 used archival data to test our hypothesis of an inverted-U relationship between hazardousness and accidents in natural work settings. Studies 3 and 4 were experiments which replicated this finding, and more importantly, demonstrated that the inverted-U relationship between hazardousness and accidents was driven by a failure to sharply increase safety behavior in response to small increases in hazardousness. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these results for the safety literature, particularly the need to educate workers regarding the pattern of safety behavior needed to fully offset environmental hazardousness.