Towards a better understanding of the psychological processes explaining safety behaviors at work

If occupational safety has substantially improved over the last 100 years (Hofmann, Burke & Zohar, 2017), it still remains a major concern for companies targeting to reduce the number of accidents to zero. Since the end of the 1980s, a way for improving workplace safety has been to apply the general management principles to safety, and to consider the influence of psychosocial and socio-organizational factors on safety as well as the importance of safety climate to promote in companies. These aspects characterize what Hale & Hovden (1998) termed the “third age of safety”. Chmiel & Hansez (2016) noted that “many job-related organizational phenomena may invoke multiple psychological processes that bear on safety behaviors and hence accidents” (p.133). Hence, besides the study of the direct impact of such psychosocial and socio-organizational factors on safety, the time has come to investigate more precisely which processes influence which types of safety outcomes. The aim of the present dissertation is therefore to examine task-related and contextual safety behaviors in the context of high risk industries and to investigate the psychological processes leading workers to adopt or not such behaviors