The Impact Of Safety Norms On Employee’s Safety Behavior Intentions

Workplace accidents lead to a large number of casualties and result in huge economic losses. The main source of accidents in the workplace is workers’unsafe behaviors. Although group norms play an important role on occupational health and safety, very few researchers pay attention to this. This study introduces focus theory of normative conduct to investigate the impact of safety norms on safety behavior intentions.Self-control is involved in resisting attempts to change attitude or behavior. Some researchers had investigated the effects of self-regulatory depletion on responses to injunctive norm or descriptive norm messages. This study introduces trait self control to explain why different kinds of safety norms have different impact on the same safety behavior intention.It had been shown that self construal affects the relationship between norms and individual behavior in some researches. However, it did not distinguish two different types of social norms, which this study explores. Specifically, this study introduces self construal to explain why different kinds of safety norms have different impact on the same safety behavior intention.Focusing on the above issues, the author designed scenario experiment and tested the research’s hypotheses through analyzing the data. The main conclusions of the study are:(1) The level of descriptive norm positively predicts safety voice intention:(2) Compared to injunctive norm, descriptive norm has a stronger effect on safety voice intention;(3) The relationship between the types of safety norms and safety compliance intention is moderated by self control;(4) Self construal has a moderating effect on the relationship between the types of safety norms and safety voice intention. Then, this paper disscusses the theoretical and practical implications, the limitation of this paper and the future research directions are also discussed.