Safety Not Guaranteed : Investigating Employees’ Safety Performance During a Global Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic threatened employees’ health and safety more than any event in recent years. Although millions of employees transitioned to working from home to mitigate infectious disease exposure, many worksites re-opened amid the pandemic as high infection rates persisted longer than expected. Safety guidelines were issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, and other national initiatives to improve the health and safety of employees returning to on-site work. The current work addresses predictors of infection control safety behaviors in a general working population that largely lacks infection control training and expertise. Drawing from Neal and Griffin’s model of safety behavior, we investigated organizational factors (i.e., perceived safety climate, organizational constraints, occupational risk) and individual factors (i.e., conscientiousness, safety attitudes, and risk aversion) associated with employees’ safety performance shortly after returning to on-site work during the pandemic. Survey results from 89 full-time employees across industries demonstrated that the organizational and individual factors accounted for 50 percent of the variance in employees’ safety performance. Conscientiousness, perceived safety climate, and safety attitudes had the strongest associations with safety performance. The findings support Neal and Griffin’s theoretical model of safety behavior in a general, non-expert population employing new infection control procedures. The current work also answers calls to compare individual and organizational factors that predict safety behavior while providing practical implications for the remainder of the COVID-19 pandemic, future health crises, and routine contagion events
Year of publication: |
[2022]
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Authors: | Gray, Cheryl E. ; Merlo, Kelsey L. ; Lawrence, Roxanne C. ; Slutsky, Jeremiah ; Allen, Tammy D. |
Publisher: |
[S.l.] : SSRN |
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