Elsevier

Safety Science

Volume 46, Issue 6, July 2008, Pages 992-1001
Safety Science

The impact of work accidents experience on causal attributions and worker behaviour

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2007.11.002Get rights and content

Abstract

It has recently been suggested that the experience of work accidents is an important variable to be considered as a predictor of workers’ perceptions (e.g. causal attributions) and behaviours. Departing from the literature, this study has two goals: (1) to analyse the relationship among work accident experience, causal attribution of accidents and workers’ behaviour; and (2) to test causal attributions as a mediating variable in the relationship between work accident experience and workers’ behaviour. To test the stability of the results, the same analyses have been performed in two Portuguese organizations, one in an industrial context and the other in an R&D context. In the industrial organization, the sample is composed of 559 employees and in the R&D organization the sample is composed of 335 employees. Results show that work accident experience is positively associated with external attributions and unsafe behaviours and negatively associated with internal attributions. Moreover, the results reveal a complete mediation of the causal attributions in the industrial organization, although in the R&D organization the mediation was only partial.

Introduction

Work accidents constitute an extremely serious problem in our society, given the important psychological, health, social, economical and organizational consequences associated with them (International Labour Organization, 2003). This problem is reinforced by statistics, which reveal worrying numbers. Recent world data, from 2001 (International Labour Office, 2005), indicates the occurrence of 268 million non-fatal and 351,500 fatal work accidents; in Europe the latest estimates, of the year 2003, allude to around 4.2 million work accidents resulting in more than 3 days of absence from work (EUROSTAT, 2005).

The last few decades have been marked by several multidisciplinary contributions to the prevention of work accidents, mainly focusing on those factors that predict workers’ behaviours in relation to prevention and risk. Scientific studies have focused their attention, primarily, on the role that human and management factors play in safety (Hale and Hovden, 1998). The literature has suggested that several variables at an organizational and group level, such as the organizational and group safety environment (e.g. Neal et al., 2000, Gonçalves et al., 2005, and at an individual level, cognitions such as risk perception, causal attribution, as well as personal accident experience (Cree and Kelloway, 1997, Melià, 1998, Lima, 1999), have played an important role in predicting workers’ behaviours. Nevertheless, the analysis of the literature shows that the results of the studies are inconclusive, and even incongruent in some situations.

The present study was developed with the principal concern of contributing to a better understanding of the variables that predict workers’ behaviours in relation to safety, namely, to explore the role of personal accident experience and causal attributions.

Many years ago, Heider (1958) called our attention to the fact that each of us, in the process of making sense of our physical and social world, acts as a “naive psychologist”, trying to explain our actions and the actions of others. By casual attributions he referred to the tendency of people to offer explanations by assessing the logical association between the cause and effect variables (Heider, 1958). The major contribution of Heider was his crucial distinction between personal/internal and situational/external causes (Leyens and Yzerbyt, 1999), as two types of explanations for an event with very different consequences. For example, work accidents being explained as a result of the inappropriate behaviour or stupidity of a worker (internal explanation) or as the consequence of a problem with machinery or noise in the work environment (external explanation) lead to different approaches towards safety.

The literature on attribution (e.g. Nisbett and Ross, 1980, Jones, 1990, Melià et al., 2001) suggests that unexpected negative events generate a higher number of attributions. Work accidents fulfil this criterion, and thus stimulate the search for a causal explanation (Melià et al., 2001). According to Kouabenan (2002), research on risk in general, and accidents in particular, elicits an intensive cognitive activity in people aimed at finding reassuring explanations and gaining a better sense of control over the situation. This is one of the functions of causal attributions, and one of the reasons why this process involves some systematic bias. Some authors have described defensive attributions in the explanation of personal experience of accidents linked with the fact that subjects, to protect their role in the situation, minimize their own responsibility and maintain their self-esteem, tending to make more external causal attributions (e.g. Hewstone, 1989, Salminen, 1992, Kouabenan et al., 2001); what has been called the fundamental attribution error, refers to the fact that observers tend to attribute events to the individuals involved in them, rather than to situational factors (e.g. Hewstone and Antaki, 1990, Melià et al., 2001). Moreover, according to Weiner (1985), the type of causal attribution produced is connected to the expectations that influence future performance. Internal attributions of failures, especially when they are also unstable and controllable (such as the attribution of an accident to “lack of care” or “lack of effort”) are associated with a more persistent behaviour in future occasions; while external attributions (such as bad luck or influence of others) and internal stable (such as “I am a careless person”) will lead to a lack of motivation to improve behaviour as it is seen as out of personal control. According to Gykye (2003, p. 533), “understanding the underlying causes of accidents provides knowledge that guides the behaviour of workers”. Nevertheless, no study has explored how causal attributions of work accidents influence workers’ behaviours.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the accident proneness theory has suggested that work accident experience influences workers’ cognitions and behaviours. However, only a small number of studies have explored how this variable influences workers’ perceptions and behaviours (Cree and Kelloway, 1997, Goldberg et al., 1991). For instance, in some studies, positive correlations were found between accident experience and safety behaviour, suggesting that accident experience appears to result in more cautionary behaviour (e.g. Laughery and Vaubel, 1989, Kouabenan, 2002).

These results, however, should be understood using models that explain why and when accident experience gives rise to safety behaviours, since the cognitive approach suggests that accident experience influences workers’ evaluation and perception, which in turn influences people’s behaviour (Laughery and Vaubel, 1989).

Causal attributions can be one of those mediating variables, but studies that explore the relationship between experience of work accidents and causal attributions of work accidents are even less frequent and the results are not clear. For example, Kouabenan (2002), contrary to his predictions, found that accident explanations were not affected by whether or not the person had been the victim of an accident in the past.

There are a small number of studies that have explored the personal work accident experience and until the present work no study has focused simultaneously on workers’ unsafe and safe behaviours. Safety behaviour refers to all safety performance in the workplace, which affects the probability of accidents, unhealthy and other undesired results. Although the quality and level of safety behaviour at work is complex and multidimensional, the most relevant safety behaviours can be identified as safe behaviours, i.e. those behaviours that contribute to reduce the probability of accidents, and unsafe behaviours, i.e. those involved in the increasing of the risk or probability of accidents (Meliá, 2007). There are some safe behaviours opposite and incompatible (e.g. use and not use a personal protective device), but many times employees perform some safe and unsafe behaviours simultaneously, or nearly simultaneous. Our observations have taught us that unsafe behaviours and safe behaviours are not necessarily incompatible with each other and they can co-exist. For instance, it is possible to see a worker using his/her helmet and gloves (safe behaviour) and breaking safety rules to get the work done faster (unsafe behaviour).

This study intends to contribute towards the clarification of the association between work accident experience and behaviours from a cognitive approach. Hence, departing from this literature and considering that having experienced an accident will have an impact on individual behaviour, one theoretical model was tested. The model hypothesizes a mediation effect, suggesting that the influence of workers’ accident experience influences causal attributions, which in turn influences workers’ behaviours (see Fig. 1). Moreover, this model includes both external and internal attributions, as well as safe behaviour and unsafe behaviour.

From this general model, some hypotheses were formulated. Work accidents are expected to be positively associated with external attributions and negatively associated with internal attributions. External attributions are also expected to be positively associated with unsafe behaviours, while internal attributions are expected to have a negative association, and the inverse correlation pattern is expected for the relation between attributions and safe behaviours.

Section snippets

Sample

In the present study, the model has been tested in two samples from two different Portuguese organizations with different contexts in the safety field: an organization from the industrial sector composed of 559 participants and an organization from the research and development sector composed of 335 participants. The sample stratification was based on the relative size of the various departments in the companies, resulting in a random sample in which the various departments were represented

Results

The results were obtained in three phases: descriptive statistics, correlation estimation and regression estimation to test the model.

Discussion of results

The current paper presents a study that aims to contribute to the understanding of work accident impact on future behaviour and the role of causal attributions. This study is distinguished from previous research due to the fact that it looks for behavioural consequences of work accident experience and causal attributions associated with work accidents. Trying to understand workers’ behaviours and identify their determinants is one of the first steps to prevention.

This study had two objectives:

Conclusion

Considering the knowledge accumulated in the literature, the results of these studies have some implications for changing organizational behaviour. Work accident experience performs a central role affecting workers’ perceptions and behaviours, suggesting that organizational learning from accidents can be important at the individual level, especially if the attribution pattern is considered. This study enhances the importance of focusing on the attribution of accidents in the workplace after an

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted by the Centro de Investigação e Intervenção Social (CIS) – Portugal and supported by the FCT-Portugal (PIQS/PSI/50070/2003).

Part of this paper was published earlier in Gonçalves, S., Silva, S., Melià, J., Lima, L., 2006. The experience of work accidents: its consequences for cognition and behaviour. In: Guedes Soares, C., Zio, E., (Eds)., Safety and Reliability for Managing Risk. London: Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 333–339.

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