Changing Safety Attitudes Throughout a Career

Workplace safety attitudes are influenced by many factors. For example, one positive contributor involves affective commitment, or how much the individual feels attached to the organization. However, affective commitment and some related attitudes develop and change throughout a career. In turn, there is an opportunity to identify what safety-related attitudes are likely to change, thereby providing optimal target attitudes for safety interventions. The current study utilized a large sample (N greater than 11,000) to conduct exploratory analyses that would identify the relationship of safety attitudes to safety climate while accounting for relative position in the organizational hierarchy. Additional analyses differentiated between the relative contributions of affective commitment and years of service to these changing attitudes. Specifically, both affective commitment and years of service significantly influenced the development of personal responsibility for safety. Higher feelings of commitment and more years of service independently related to higher adoption of personal responsibility for safety. Non-compliance similarly exhibited a relationship with both variables, but while the connection was much less robust, these attitudes varied greatly in their relationship to overall safety climate. Taken together, personal responsibility for safety and non-compliance attitudes represent two of the most prominent individual perceptions about safety that change across a career.