Safety and Occupational Goal Conflicts: Cause and Effect of Work-Safety Tension on Safety-Related Risky Decision Making

Dear Colleagues,

The idea of this Special Issue is to discuss and review the theory (e.g., in terms of reviews) and empirical evidence investigating the complex interplay between the person and the situation, which might lead to rule violations and unsafe acts.

In order to ensure safe behavior, organizations implement rules, which are intended to lead to safe acts. It is implicitly assumed that adherence to all safety-related rules leads to an accident-free environment, whilst deviations from established rules contributes to accidents within a system. However, workers often feel the burden of the overspecification of rules and overregulation, with consequences or rules that fail to align with accomplishing their work tasks, meaning that it is assumed impossible to adhere to all rules and still get the job done. This is also called the work–safety tension, or the productivity versus safety dilemma. Other reasons may be attributed to experience or gender stereotype-based overconfidence, the desire to appear “macho” or fit into work culture expectations and roles.

This Special Issue invites contributions addressing work–safety tension, which may lead to risky decision making in terms of rule violations, unsafe acts, as well as further reasons to violate safety-related rules. In contrast to human error, only recently have various works examined so-called procedural violations and unsafe acts in a targeted manner. Nevertheless, rule violations as objects of investigation and discussion are still confined to the shadows. With regard to risk-taking behavior, in this narrow field of existing work, little to no attention has been paid to the aspect of socialization in the context of safety-related decisions at work. Analyses of various accidents in the last few years point, however, to the relevance of rule violations in relation to accidents and incidents, which can cause considerable damage to people, companies and the environment.

We welcome papers that address aspects of:

• person-related variables, e.g., personality, motivation, attitudes, decision-making strategies;
• situation-related variables, e.g., types of rules, perceived production and time pressure, leadership aspects, safety climate, the implementation of audits and feedback;
• HR and performance management strategies that lead to unintended unsafe behavior.

The challenges of changing risk-related attitudes should also be examined in the broader context of risk propensity, taking into account the values conveyed by gender stereotypes.

This Special Issue will focus not only on the emergence of rule violations in organizational contexts, but also countermeasures. We will focus on the question of how one can prevent rule violations or counter them on individual, team and organizational levels, as well as a guide on how to address risk-related stereotypes.

Prof. Dr. Annette Kluge
Prof. Dr. Steven Mallam
Guest Editors

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