Expected Management Safety Behavior

Organizations vary considerably in terms of how they manage safety. Thus, the expectations of management safety behavior formed from one workplace may have little basis in reality in another workplace. At this point, it is also worth noting the vast literature on safety culture and safety climate. Safety culture stems from the organization and is the top-down safety values, beliefs, and norms, while safety climate is more accurately defined as the employee s perceptions of how various aspects of the working environment impact on their safety (see Bjerkan 2010, for a 

The expected management safety behavior scale used by Burt et al. (2012) has 13 items, and both versions are shown in Table 9.5. Scale items were adapted from Chmiel s (2005) management safety climate scale, and from Walker and Hutton s (2006), scale measuring how management deal with safety. Burt et al. (2012) reported Cronbach s alphas for the new employee version of 0.92 and 0.88, and a value of 0.89 for the incumbent version. 

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Table 9.5 The expected management safety behavior scale items...

Whatever the size of an organization—10 employees or 100,000—the foregoing principles apply to achieve superior safety results. Safety is culture-driven, and the board of directors and senior management define the culture and the expected pattern of behavior. 

Chapters of books and articles have been written with titles such as The Hazard Control Process, Basic Safety Programming, Managing Safety Performance, Management of Loss Control, and Safety Performance. But none of the authors considered the impact of an organization s culture on the safety performance attainable. To achieve superior safety results, the system of expected behavior deriving from the culture must demonstrate that such results are to be attained. 

Many companies expect managers to enforce safety rules and procedures. Consequently, employees tend to rely on managers to ensure safe behavior rather than look out for each other. Employees are not adequately challenged to improve safety, and many of them tend to look to someone else for primary responsibility for their safety. 

Line Management (area managers, unit managers)—those responsible for collecting metrics data and ensuring that the behaviors in the work area are consistent with the expectations of the process safety system. 

One of the most important uses for information on the environmental behavior of the actinides is evaluation of safety for radioactive waste management. Commercial radioactive wastes are expected to be managed so that the actinides and other nuclides do not enter the environment. The process of selecting effective waste management methods requires, however, that release to the environment be considered and evaluated. 

There are many scales that have been developed to measure safety-related variables. The majority of these focus on aspects of safety climate. It is not the intention of this chapter to examine these measures. Rather, the specific focus is on the factors which are direcdy related to new employee safety. Thus, the measures discussed in this chapter are restricted to those which measure attitudes and expectations which new employees bring to the workplace worker attitudes and behaviors which are particularly important for new employee adaption and behaviors, such as helping, which are associated with being a new employee. It is the opinion of this author that measurement provides evidence which can be presented to new employees, coworkers, and management in order to help explain the safety issues associated with new employees. Furthermore, the collection of data provides a degree of precision in terms of the issues faced by a specific organization, for a specific job, and related to the type of new employees being recruited. 

The expected supervision scale has 6 items, and both versions are shown in Table 9.6. Scale items were developed based on the discussion of supervisor behavior required to ensure new employee safety in Chap. 4, Sect. 4.2.8. At the time of writing, no data on the psychometric properties of this scale had been collected. As noted in Chap. 3, supervision of new employees should be a specific task assigned to supervisors. Furthermore, new employees are likely to expect that supervisors will be there to ensure their safety. As noted in many places in this book, the perception that a system has a component which is there to protect a person from risk can lead to more risk being taken. Thus, it is very important that new employees have a realistic perception of the degree of supervision that they will receive. It is also important to note that employees (job incumbents) are asked to complete this scale—not supervisors. Employees should be able to respond to the items in terms of the experiences they have had with supervision, whereas supervisors may respond in terms of what higher management expect of them, rather than their actual supervision of new employees. 

Where the culture, the system of expected behavior, demands superior safety performance, the design and engineering, management and operations, and task performance aspects of safety are well-balanced. 

B. Management commitment or noncommitment to safety is an expression of an organization s culture, an expression of its system of expected behavior. 

An organization s culture is translated into a system of expected behavior. Management commitment or noncommitment to safety is an expression of the culture and demonstrates the system of expected behavior. All aspects of safety, favorable or unfavorable, derive from that commitment or noncommitment. 

Surely, employees should be trained and empowered up to their capabilities, and procedures should be established for employees to make contributions to safety. But, employees should not be expected to do what they cannot do. Nor should the focus be on their behavior (the so-called unsafe act) when the causal factors for hazards-related incidents derive principally from less than adequate design or operations management. Employees are greatly limited by the work system—established by and under the control of management. 

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