Physical environment and safety outcomes:the role of 'restorativeness' at the workplace

The theoretical framework of this study comes from Environmental Psychology, an area that studies the relationships between people and the socio-physical environment. This study investigates the relationship between the physical setting and safety performance at the workplace. Physical characteristics of the environment affect directly psycho-physiological well being. Stress occurs when there is an imbalance between physical setting demands and human resources, because individuals cannot cope with in the proper way. In fact one of the causes of unsafe behaviours and performance are physical and mental resources put in jeopardy by stress due to the workplace physical characteristics. Physical characteristics mostly related to psycho-physiological stress and mental fatigue are: Stimulation, actually intensity, variety and complexity of the physical setting; affordances namely ambiguous or in conflict information concerning the function of elements in the physical setting; control that is the possibility to manage and/or change bad characteristics of the physical setting. The construct “restorativeness” refers to the presence/absence level of all these characteristics that can be measured with the Perceived Restorativeness Scale (PRS; Hartig, Korpela, Evans & Garling, 1996; Pasini, Berto, Scopelliti, & Carrus, 2009), a self-report instruments based on the Attention Restoration Theory (Kaplan, 1993). A sample of 1617 metal-mechanic workers from eight north-east Italy companies participated in a study on safety at work. A short version of the PRS tailored to metal-workers' physical setting was used to measure perceived restorativeness of workplace, and self-report accidents were recorded. A negative relation was found between perceived restorativeness and accidents (F(2,1595) = 16,96; p < .001): Workers who perceived their workplace as less “restorative” also referred they had more accidents since they were in the company.