Maria Matthews
Leeds Beckett University
Maria Matthews is a Research Associate in behavioural safety working on a Knowledge Transfer Partnership project through Leeds Beckett University and VolkerRail Ltd, a specialist railway infrastructure services company. This project aims to design, implement and embed, targeted and tailored, data driven behavioural interventions to improve Health, Safety and well-being across VolkerRail staff. Her educational background is in Health Psychology (Psychology BSc, Health Psychology MSc) and she is currently working towards chartership status as a Health Psychologist. Previous to this role she spent 4 years working in the area of medical research and has specific interest in behaviour change and intervention design.
Fatal worker injuries in the UK Rail Industry have remained consistently low over recent years as demonstrated by the UK Network Rail workforce safety statistics; with zero workforce fatalities in 15/16 and an average of 3 fatalities a year since 2002 (45 in total). This decline since the 1990’s is likely due to legislation and improved safeguarding practices, with the industry taking a “systems” approach to safety (Reason, 1995). Whilst fatal worker injury rates remain low, non-fatal injuries remain a common occurrence with 6597 workforce injuries reported to Network Rail in 15/16.
Despite an overall decline since the 1990’s, non-fatal injuries in recent years have remained similar annually (6380 in 13/14 and 6311 in 15/16).The industry often describes this as an accident “plateau” (Morgan and Webster-Spriggs, 2013), a point at which traditional health and safety assurances have exhausted their value. Further reduction of work-related accidents may therefore require the manipulation of individual psychological and behavioural factors.
Despite this, studies exploring the relationship between psychological factors and safety outcomes are quite scarce (Laurent, Chmiel & Hansez, 2016), particularly in relation to the influence of well being and stress. The literature around stress in the workplace is largely concerned with identifying the characteristics and antecedents of psychological and social measures of stress as opposed to the role stress plays in safety. Studies that have explored this relationship have tended to focus on the extremes of work related stress. For example, Li et al (2013) explored the mediating role of emotional exhaustion in the relationship between job demands and safety compliance and Nahrgang, Morgeson & Hofmann (2011) reported employee burnout to be associated with unsafe behaviours. Others have studied the impact of stress on specific cognitive processes or skill, for example situation awareness (Sneddon et al 2012) or how stress may lead to human error through cognitive failure (Day, Brasher and Bridger 2012).
The aim of this study was therefore to explore the relationship between stressors and two types of safety behaviour; compliance and participation. We also aimed to explore whether such a relationship could be explained via a relationship with safety motivation. Questionnaire data was collected from 381 safety critical staff across the VolkerRail business. Work related stressors were measured using the HSE management standards stress indicator. Safety motivation, compliance and participation was measured using 3 scales from the Neal, Griffin and Hart (2000).
We performed a multivariate mulitple regression which confirmed a predictive relationship of workplace stressors on safety motivation, safety compliance and safety participation. Mediated regression analysis confirmed that the relationship between workplace stressors and safety compliance and participation was mediated through safety motivation. Stressors therefore may be implicated in an individuals motivation to act safely and in their safety related behaviours, highlighting the importance of considering
Systems safety, risk management and incident reporting , Safety culture
