"Promoting Workplace Safety: Causes, Measurement Issues, and Intervention"

Over 3 million work-related injuries and illnesses occur annually. This symposium presents five empirically, contextually, and methodologically diverse studies that provide insight on how to enact effective safety interventions given different national, industry, and organizational features. The session opens with empirical findings from a large scale study undertaken in hospitals in China and India, providing important evidence on the role of national and organizational labor practices in safety management. Collectively, the studies provide a comprehensive approach to the promotion of workplace safety, spanning from a) individual- (e.g., workload) and organizational-level factors (e.g., safety climate, production pressure, affective job insecurity climate) that may increase/decrease employees’ unsafe behaviors, injuries and reporting attitudes, b) the measurement issues associated with trying to use self-report data to assess work-related accidents, and c) what organizations can do after an accident has occurred, especially when a work-related injury is blamed on the organization. The five empirical papers examine what organizations can do to promote workplace safety at various stages: 1) to prevent injuries by considering multiple organization-level predictors (e.g., safety climate vs. production pressure; affective job insecurity climate); 2) get an accurate assessment of employee injuries; and 3) intervene once an injury has occurred. Safety Climate and Production Pressure as Moderators of Workload-Compliance Link Presenter: Laura Petitta; Sapienza U. of Rome National and Organizational Labor Practices in Hospital Accidents in China and India Presenter: Charmine E. J. Hartel; U. of Queensland Comparing Recall vs. Recognition Measures of Accident Under-reporting Presenter: Laura Petitta; Sapienza U. of Rome Multilevel Examination of Affective Job Insecurity Climate on Safety Outcomes Presenter: Lixin Jiang; U. of Wisconsin, Oshkosh Organizational Repairing Strategies to Employees Relational Harm from Work-related Injuries Presenter: Charmine E. J. Hartel; U. of Queensland