How safety accountability impacts the safety performance of safety managers: A moderated mediating model

This explored how safety accountability impacts safety performance of ‘safety managers’.

Data was via survey of 269 Chinese safety managers (So note the demographics in interpreting the generalisability of the results, as always).

For background:

·???????? There’s said to be a close connection between safety accountability and types of safety performance

·???????? They discuss different types of safety performance, and accountability – both from macro and micro perspectives

·???????? “Accountability in high-risk industries is controversial, but is favored by top managers as an important factor in promoting safety management”

·???????? Management are said to often define safety responsibilities and assign them to individuals – called ‘safety managers’ in this paper

·???????? They discuss different ways that safety performance can be described – like statistics (incidents etc.). This study uses employee behaviour and sociological perspectives, and only focuses on the level of the individual

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Results

Key findings:

·???????? “safety accountability has both positive and negative effects on safety performance by enhancing safety managers’ professional identification and role overload”

·???????? “This means that safety accountability is a “double-edged sword” for improving the safety performance of enterprise safety managers”

·???????? “On the one hand, the results of mediating effect demonstrate that professional identification promotes the relationship between safety accountability and safety performance”

·???????? Here, 26% of the impact of safety accountability on safety performance related to professional identification within safety managers

·???????? The findings show that “when the safety climate is low, the positive role of professional identification is more obvious; however, as the safety climate improves, the positive role of professional identification gradually decreases”

·???????? “On the other hand, role overload may inhibit the impact of safety accountability on safety performance”

Discussing the findings, it’s said that role overload may have both a promoting or suppressing effect on the relationship between safety accountability and safety performance. Role overload can “promote safety performance when the safety climate is low; however, as safety climate improves, this promoting effect gradually weakens and even turns into a suppressing effect”.

They argue that this effect may take place via the following: emotional exhaustion significantly negatively moderates safety performance, and hence, role stress from short-term accountability may “indeed increase employee safety performance, especially for young safety managers”.

However, when safety managers gradually integrate into the enterprise safety climate, the role overload will incrementally increase their negative experience; manifesting as significant decreases in safety performance.

They then discuss China’s accountability approaches in the context of occupational settings. Three “unfavorable tendencies of perfunctory, extensive, and simplified accountability” emerge, making “accountability an irrational behavior that caters to the public and media”.

For instance, “strict accountability” during the COVID pandemic may have “increased public officials’ responsibility-shirking behaviors” and “may lead to grass-roots managers “carrying the black pot,” and ignoring the real risks”.

Hence, from these findings, the authors maintain that accountability is a double-edged sword.

They further note that most studies in this area have focused on the positive effects of accountability, whereas this study found that it can have both positive and negative effects via role overload.

Therefore, the results “reminds us not to put too much faith in the contribution of safety accountability to safety performance, especially if the accountability system is less than perfect”.

Other approaches to accountability were then discussed. For example, “retrospective accountability after accidents in high-consequence industries may not help reduce accidents” and in contrast, “prospective accountability may be more instructive”.

Here, they quote another author, stating that: “Guenther (2021) said, “[accountability] should be helping me improve, not telling me I’m a bad teacher.”

They further argue that China’s approach to accountability has relied too much on results over process. It’s argued that “accountability that focuses? only on results does not provide direction or motivation for employees and stifles personal control”.

Further, risks are uncertain, and safety managers do not have sufficient resources and power to necessarily shape their context in order to successfully deliver on all expected elements of accountability.

Therefore, “accident indicators are not an excellent way to measure safety performance”.

Process-based accountability is said to have “obvious” advantages over result-based accountability in establishing personal safety responsibility. Importantly, for many people in high-risk industries “the boundaries of accountability are often not clearly defined ex-ante, but rather ex-post” (emphasis added).

Finally, while moderate stress and role load may stimulate employee performance, long-term stress accumulation may have negative effects – and accountability expectations contribute to this balance.

Authors: Sha, Y., Zhang, Y., & Zhang, Y. (2024). How safety accountability impacts the safety performance of safety managers: A moderated mediating model.?Journal of safety research,?89, 160-171.