Incentive Schemes Increase Risky Behavior in a Safety-Critical Working Task: An Experimental Comparison in a Simulated High-Reliability Organization
Chair of Business Psychology, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 44780 Bochum, Germany
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Academic Editor: Raphael Grzebieta
Safety 2022, 8(1), 17; https://doi.org/10.3390/safety8010017
Received: 29 December 2021
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Revised: 22 February 2022
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Accepted: 23 February 2022
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Published: 4 March 2022
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Safety and Occupational Goal Conflicts: Cause and Effect of Work-Safety Tension on Safety-Related Risky Decision Making)
As financial incentive schemes have the tendency to increase risky behavior, we analyzed their effect on rule-related behavior in a safety-critical task. We compared risky behavior (in terms of the amount of rule violations) between three payment condition: continuous, up-front, and bonus pay. Fifty-nine participants were trained as production personnel to conduct a start-up procedure of a simulated wastewater treatment plant, representing a high reliability organization. During the 5-h experimental study, risky behavior could have been applied 48 times while building a simulated production year. The results show that the conditions with an incentive scheme (up-front and bonus pay) led to significantly more rule violations than the condition with continuous payment without an incentive scheme. Our study highlights the general increased risk effect of incentive schemes and provides a starting point for industries to assess their implicit and explicit incentive schemes.
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MDPI and ACS Style
Brandhorst, S.; Kluge, A. Incentive Schemes Increase Risky Behavior in a Safety-Critical Working Task: An Experimental Comparison in a Simulated High-Reliability Organization. Safety 2022, 8, 17. https://doi.org/10.3390/safety8010017
AMA Style
Brandhorst S, Kluge A. Incentive Schemes Increase Risky Behavior in a Safety-Critical Working Task: An Experimental Comparison in a Simulated High-Reliability Organization. Safety. 2022; 8(1):17. https://doi.org/10.3390/safety8010017
Chicago/Turabian StyleBrandhorst, Sebastian, and Annette Kluge. 2022. "Incentive Schemes Increase Risky Behavior in a Safety-Critical Working Task: An Experimental Comparison in a Simulated High-Reliability Organization" Safety 8, no. 1: 17. https://doi.org/10.3390/safety8010017
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