Safety at Work: Two Different Moderating Models Considering Organisational Safety Climate and Job Insecurity

This study attempts to combine two different areas of research exploring the relationship between job insecurity (JI) and workplace safety. In the past years, there has been a great amount of research on the consequences of JI (e.g. De Witte, 1999; Sverke, Hellgreen and Naswall, 2002), but few studies explicitly considered the role of job insecurity on safety outcomes. Moreover, results of these studies show conflicting findings (Probst & Broubaker, 2001; Parker, Axtell and Turner, 2001), suggesting that this relationship could be moderated by other variables that may influence the extent to which JI affects employee safety outcomes. Probst (2004) found that one of these moderators is organizational safety climate (Zohar, 2010). In a pilot study conducted in North-east Italy in manufacturing sector we try to deeper investigate this moderating effect, considering the influence of JI on determinants of safety behaviours (Neil, Griffin & Hart, 2000), that is safety motivation and safety knowledge, in particular distinguishing between motivation to comply and motivation to participate. We also want to test an alternative model in which JI acts as a moderator of the relationship between safety climate and determinants and components of safety behaviours.