The Effect Of Partner-instigated Social Undermining On Employees’ Safety Behavior:a Dual Path Model Of Cognition And Emotion

Employee’s safety behavior is an important factor affecting the occurrence of organizational safety accidents and injuries.Previous studies on the antecedents of safety behaviors mainly focused variables in the work domain(such as leaderships,team climate and culture,and relationships between leaders and members,etc.),ignoring the impact of specific experiences purely in the family domain.Social undermining is a negative,unsupportive interpersonal interaction behavior,and its damaging effect on employees’ job performance will be accentuated when it is perpetrated by a partner or spouse who is supposed to provide social support.Therefore,based on the work-family mechanism,conservation of resource theory and cognitive-affective processing system(CAPS)theory,this study examines the influence of partner-instigated social undermining on employees’ safety behavior and its internal mechanism.This study includes three studies.In the first study,the state rumination questionnaire was revised,and 664 employees were selected from two state-owned enterprises by cluster random sampling.The Chinese version of the scale was formed after a complete translation-back translation procedure,and exploratory factor analysis,confirmatory factor analysis,reliability analysis,compatible validity analysis,criterion-related validity analysis were carried out to obtain the status rumination questionnaire with good reliability and validity,which is suitable for Chinese samples.In study 2,145 effective participants who have partners were selected from a state-owned oil company by cluster random sampling,to examine a causal relationship between partner-instigated social undermining and employees’ safety behavior and the mediating effect of state rumination and negative work emotion,using the between-subjects design to perform a cued recall experiment.Study 3 was a two-stage(two weeks apart)questionnaire study,using cluster random sampling,361 enterprise employees from two large oil and cement manufacturing companies were selected as participants,and the social undermining scale,ruminative responses scale,negative emotion scale and safety behavior scale were used as measuring tools.Hence,in the real situation of the organization,the relationship and mechanisms between social undermining issued by partners and employees’ safety behavior were again examined,so as to improve the sensitivity and generalization of the conclusion.SPSS25.0 and Process 3.5 macro as well as Mplus 7.0 software were used to manage and analyze the data.The main findings are as follows:(1)The reliability and validity of the revised state rumination scale meets the measurement requirements;(2)The questionnaire study show that partner-instigated social undermining negatively predicts employees’ safety compliance and safety participation behaviors;(3)Both the experimental study and the questionnaire study show that negative work emotion mediates the relationship between partner-instigated social undermining and the safety compliance and safety participation of employees;(4)The questionnaire study show that rumination and negative work emotion play a serial mediating role between partner-instigated social undermining and employee’s safety behavior.