Journal of Safety Research

Journal of Safety Research

Volume 68, February 2019, Pages 27-32
Journal of Safety Research

The effect of organizational justice as perceived by occupational drivers on traffic accidents: Mediating effects of job satisfaction

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2018.11.001Get rights and content

Highlights

  • This is the first study to show the relationship between organizational justice and traffic accidents.

  • Job satisfaction mediates the relationship between organizational justice and traffic accidents.

  • This study expands safety research to include organizational justice for preventing traffic accidents.

Abstract

Introduction: Considerable research supports a positive association between the safety climate (which is a direct organizational factor) and safety performance (such as safe driving). However, indirect organizational variables that influence safe driving have gone largely unexplored. This study contributes to safety research by examining the relationship between organizational justice, which is a distal organizational factor, and traffic accidents and the mediating role of job satisfaction. Method: 233 occupational drivers employed by taxi and bus companies in South Korea participated in the study. Regression analysis was conducted using police records on participants' on-the-job traffic accidents. Results: The analysis shows that the mediation model is statistically significant. That is, drivers with a lower level of perceived organizational justice showed a higher frequency of traffic accidents, and the mediating effect of job satisfaction was also significant. Based on the results, implications and limitations are discussed. Practical applications: The findings demonstrate that in order to decrease traffic accidents, transportation companies would benefit by examining distal factors such as organizational justice. This approach suggests that the conventional framework for safety management should be broadened to include aspects of the entire organization.

Introduction

Traffic accidents by professional drivers comprise a large portion of all traffic accidents. The Korean National Police Agency (2017) reported that although the proportion of commercial vehicles among all vehicles was only 6.3%, they caused 23% of traffic accidents in 2016. This high proportion of work-related traffic accidents is commonly seen in other industrialized countries (EU-OSHA, 2010, Wishart et al., 2017). Despite this, little attention has been paid to the specific factors that may influence such accidents by occupational drivers.

To more fully understand the complexity of traffic accidents, researchers have suggested useful models, such as the Context Mediated Model (Sümer, 2003). For traffic accidents by occupational drivers, the Occupational Light Vehicle Use System Model (Stuckey, LaMontagne, Glass, & Sim, 2010) considers the organizational environment as well as the driver, vehicle, road, and relevant legislation in its multiple levels. Safety climate, which is the shared beliefs, values, policies, and practices associated with safety among members of a specific group (Cooper and Phillips, 2004, Zohar, 2003), has been studied as an important organizational factor that impacts employees' driving (Newnam and Watson, 2011, Wishart et al., 2017). For example, Taylor and Dorn (2006) found that work operational factors, such as failing to ensure breaks and implementing an inadequate shift system, could lead to dangerous driving behaviors. However, occupational drivers can also be affected indirectly by other organizational factors. Although little research has been conducted on other organizational variables that affect road-accident injuries by occupational drivers, their potential influence can be inferred from the findings of several studies. For example, a study on accidents in the workplace revealed that accidents on the job are directly or indirectly affected by both organizational and individual errors (Reason, 1995). Caird and Kline (2004) also investigated the effects of organizational factors, along with driver behavior, on on-the-job traffic accidents and found that drivers' perceptions of their organization's support and demands had an indirect impact on their risk for accidents. These studies suggest that the job performance (i.e., safe driving) of a company's occupational drivers may be directly or indirectly influenced by various organizational variables.

The primary aim of this study was to extend previous research by investigating the effect of organizational justice, which has been identified as having a significant influence on employees' job performance in many recent studies (Muchinsky, 2012), on the number of traffic accidents caused by occupational drivers. Gyekye and Haybatollahi (2014) report that employees' perception of organizational justice constitutes their perception of workplace safety, and that the more they perceive their organization as fair, the higher their job satisfaction and the lower their accident rates. There is no published study on whether occupational drivers' perception of their company's level of organizational justice affects their performance, and specifically their driving performance. However, in consideration of Gyekye and Haybatollahi's findings, it can reasonably be construed that organizational justice influences the rate of occupational drivers' traffic accidents. Our secondary goal was to explore the mediating role of job satisfaction to identify the underlying mechanism of the relationships between organizational justice and occupational drivers' safety performance.

Section snippets

Organizational justice and safe driving

People who belong to an organization are sensitive to how they are treated in the organization. Their attitudes vary, depending on whether they perceive their treatment as fair or unfair, and their attitudes determine their behavior in the organization (Moorman, 1991). Organizational justice is a concept that represents employee perceptions of fairness in the workplace and their reactions to the various types of treatment they receive (James, 1993). Most of the studies on organizational justice

Data collection and sample

Data were collected from two taxi companies and four bus companies in Seoul, South Korea. Two hundred thirty-three commercial drivers completed our survey; 39 were excluded from the analyses because they did not have official accident data. The remaining participants (n = 194) were all male. Their mean age was 53.75(SD = 8.04), and their mean driving experience was 25.18 years (SD = 8.22).

Organizational justice

We measured distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactional justice independently, then

Descriptive statistics

Descriptive statistics and bivariate correlations for all variables are presented in Table 1. The results of correlation analyses reveal that all three subtypes of organizational justice were significantly related to job satisfaction (r = 0.30 ~ 0.33, p < .001). In addition, traffic accidents were significantly related to interactional justice (r = − 0.17, p < .05) and job satisfaction (r = − 0.18, p < .05).

Tests of hypotheses

In Hypothesis 1, we proposed that as the perception of organizational justice (distributive

Main findings and discussion

Although an organization's safety climate, which emphasizes the role of direct control procedures for safety behaviors, has been revealed to be a significant organizational factor in occupational drivers' safe driving, the influence of other organizational cultures or policies on safe performance (i.e., traffic accidents) has been little explored. An employee's safe driving can be affected by the company's system of rewards and punishments and organizational supports, along with other policies

Conclusion

In response to the scarcity of research on organizational aspects that influence safe driving by occupational drivers, we sought to examine whether occupational drivers' perceptions of their organizations' fairness is significantly related to the number of traffic accidents they experience and the mediating role of job satisfaction. Our analysis of actual traffic accident data from police records for and self-reported survey responses from Korean taxi and bus drivers found that organizational

Author biography

Chung, E. K., Jung, Y., & Sohn, Y. W. (2017). A moderated mediation model of job stress, job, satisfaction, and turnover intention among airport security screeners, Safety Science, 98, 89-97.

Chung, E. K., Shin, Y. H., & Sohn Y. W. (2016). Effects of shift pattern and expertise on perceived workload and performance for aviation security screeners. Journal of The Korean Society for Aviation and Aeronautics, 24, 1-9.

Park, Y., Chung, E. K., Koo, H., & Sohn, Y. W. (2016). How sensation seeking

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by 2016 Research Grant from Kangwon National University and Korea Transportation Safety Authority (KOTSA 2014-217).

Su Jin Kim is on a doctoral program of industrial and organizational psychology at Yonsei University and has an experience in developing the driving aptitude test and the aviation aptitude test. Her research interests include safety climate in workplaces, workplace deviant behavior, driving safety, driving ability of senior drivers etc.,

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  • Cited by (0)

    Su Jin Kim is on a doctoral program of industrial and organizational psychology at Yonsei University and has an experience in developing the driving aptitude test and the aviation aptitude test. Her research interests include safety climate in workplaces, workplace deviant behavior, driving safety, driving ability of senior drivers etc.,

    Eun Kyoung Chung is an associate professor of industrial and safety psychology at Kangwon National University. Her research interests include safety culture, safety management, workplace safety, driving safety, aviation safety etc. Chung holds a Phd in industrial and organizational psychology and has published several articles within the field of safety research.

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