New employee safety expectations

The importance of understanding new employee safety expectations is further reinforced if expectations are considered within the framework of risk homeostasis theory. Wilde and colleagues developed risk homeostasis theory (see Wilde et al. 2002 Simonet and Wilde 1997) which proposes that as safety feamres (expected or real) are added to a system, users tend to increase their exposure to risk because they feel better protected. For example, if a new employee expects that equipment is well maintained, they may use equipment without checking its functionality. Similarly, if a new employee expects that co-workers will remove hazards from the workplace, or not create hazards, they may not actively engage in as much monitoring for hazards. Put it another way, incorrect safety expectations can lead a new employee to take unexpected risks. 

---

The scales and measurement options discussed in this chapter are presented in the order which they might be used to manage new employee safety. Section 9.2 examines measures of new employee safety expectations. Sect. 9.3 examines measures which provide an awareness of helping safety risks, and Sect. 9.4... 

If exiting employees are not voicing safety concerns, then the organization may not have the necessary knowledge required to prompt corrective action, and the new employee (even those with realistic expectations of the normal safety risk profile for the job type) may be about to enter a job with an unacceptable level of safety risk (beyond those normally associated with the type of work). Thus, new employee safety will be enhanced if a workplace has a safety voicing culture, where employees freely share safety information, and this is supported and reinforced by both management and co-workers. In contrast, a new employee that enters a workplace which has a silence culture, or has employees that want to voice about safety but feel they cannot for some reason, can be exposed to more safety risk than is necessary. 

As noted, socialization processes are likely to be perceived in a similar way to prestart training. That is, if an organization has a socialization process where new employees are introduced to safety policy and procedures, it might be reasonable to assume that this will have a positive impact on the new employee s safety-related behavior on the job. A study by Mullen (2004) supported this proposition, finding that early socialization processes could have a positive influence on safety behavior. Of course, socialization processes may have no effect at all. A new employee, who is asked during socialization to learn the organization s safety policy and procedures, understand the organization s emphasis on safety (its safety culture in the form of norms, beliefs, roles, attitudes, and practices), and learn how to complete appropriate forms (such as hazard sheets, near miss reports), may simply not achieve these expected outcomes. To help increase the chances that socialization will have a positive impact on new employees safety, best practice should be adopted. 

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. 

Burt and Hislop (2013) developed the 6 items shown in the left hand column of Table 9.11 to measure employees perception of the safety behavior of past new recruits and reported a Cronbach s alpha for the 6 items of 0.79. The items in the right hand column of Table 9.11 are the prospective equivalent. These items measure worker expectations of new employees. Generally, expectations are based on past experience therefore, an employee s responses to the two scales shown in Table 9.11 will probably be highly correlated. Of course, there are always exceptions, and while all previously encountered new employees may have been perfect safety citizens, the next new employee may be a real danger. Using the scales shown in Table 9.11, employees can be instmcted (shown) how their expectations are driven by their previous experience, and also instructed in the dangers of making the assumption that aU new employees are alike. 

Types of New Employee Experience and Pre-entry Safety Expectations... 

---