High performance workplace systems’ influence on safety attitudes and occupational driver behaviour
Section snippets
High performance workplace systems’ influence on safety attitudes and occupational driver behaviour
Work-related driving is a major risk for organisations. This is due, in part, to factors such as fleet vehicles in Australia travelling three times the distance of average private vehicles (WorkSafe, 2008). It has also been suggested that the higher risk can be attributed to a lack of understanding of how employers create a workplace that supports safe driving practices (Newnam et al., 2017, Warmerdam et al., 2017a).
Government agencies provide some direction for employers to support compliance
Participants and procedure
This research study was granted ethics approval by the Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee. Recruitment of senior managers, occupational drivers and supervisors was facilitated through a government injury database spanning 13 industries, categorised according to Australian and New Zealand Industrial Classification (ABS, 2016). Enterprise-sized organisations (500 + employees; n = 52; 64%) were more highly represented in the sample compared with small to medium (1–199 employees;
Univariate descriptions
The bivariate correlations between the hypothesised variables are reported in Table 2. Consistent with the hypotheses, driver behaviour was found to be significantly correlated with HPWS (r = .13), safety climate (r = −.18), efficacy (r = −.14) and driver attitudes (r = −.19). These correlations showed that driver behaviour was negatively influenced by HPWS but positively influenced by individual attributes. This analysis does not take into account the multi-level nature of the data. As such,
Conclusion
Despite research efforts, work-related driving remains a major risk for organisations. This is the first study to test the higher order concept of HPWS across a sample of multiple organisations using a multi-level nested data structure that accounts for individual and organisational level contributions to safety. Overall, the results demonstrated that HPWS practices need to be aligned with safety goals in the work-related driver context in order to challenge driver’s attitudes toward safe
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