Enjoyment, values, pressure, or something else : what influences employees’ safety behaviours?

Abstract

A key component to maintaining a safe work environment is having employees’ regularly engaging in safety behaviours. It is important to understand both the quantity and quality of motivation when trying to predict safety behaviours. There has been little investigation into the different types of employee safety motivation. Using self-determination theory, I address the question of what motivates employees to work safely. I refined and validated a scale to measure different types of safety motivation and examined the relationships between different types of safety motivation and safety behaviours across three separate studies. Study one refined and validated the multi-dimensional self-determined safety motivation (SDSM) scale (Scott, Fleming, & Kelloway, 2014) and examined the relationships between safety climate, safety motivation, and safety behaviours. Study two further refined and validated the SDSM scale and further tested the relationships between different types of safety motivation and safety behaviours across a more diverse sample. In the third study, I tested the direction of the relationships between different types of safety motivation and safety behaviours over two time periods. This research provides evidence of the reliability and validity of the SDSM scale. Overall, the results highlight the importance of autonomous forms of safety motivation in encouraging employee safety behaviours and also highlights the lack of importance that controlled forms of safety motivation have on safety behaviours, particularly external safety regulation.