Safety Culture, Moral Disengagement, and Accident ... · disengagement Organizational safety...

Safety Culture, Moral Disengagement, and AccidentUnderreporting

Laura Petitta1 • Tahira M. Probst2 • Claudio Barbaranelli1

Received: 29 October 2014 /Accepted: 13 May 2015 / Published online: 28 May 2015

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Abstract Moral disengagement (MD) is the process by

which individuals mitigate the consequences of their own

violations of moral standards. Although MD is understood

to be co-determined by culture norms, no study has yet

explored the extent to which MD applied to safety at work

(JS-MD) fosters safety violations (e.g., accident underre-

porting), nor the role of organizational culture as a pre-

dictor of JS-MD. The current study seeks to address this

gap in the literature by examining individual- (MD) and

organizational-level (culture) factors that explain why

employees fail to report workplace accidents. We tested a

latent variable structural model positing organizational

culture typologies (autocratic, bureaucratic, clan-patron-

age, technocratic, and cooperative) as predictors of JS-MD,

which in turn is expected to mediate the relationship with

accident underreporting. Using data from 1033 employees

in 28 Italian organizations, findings suggest that bureau-

cratic safety culture was related to lower levels of JS-MD,

whereas technocratic safety culture was related to greater

JS-MD. In turn, JS-MD positively predicted employee

accident underreporting and fully mediated the relationship

between culture and underreporting. Theoretical and

practical implications are discussed in light of the

increasing focus on underreporting as well as the adverse

individual and organizational consequences of failing to

report workplace accidents.

Keywords Accident underreporting � Moral

disengagement � Organizational safety culture

Safety Culture, Moral Disengagement,and Accident Underreporting

National surveillance statistics in Italy (INAIL 2011)

indicate that approximately 400,000 workers are injured

each year, representing a rate of 3.7 cases for every 100

full-time equivalent (FTE) workers. Not only are the eco-

nomic costs of such workplace accidents high—accounting

for 2.8 % of the Gross Domestic Product (Eurispes 2010),

but clearly there are steep psychosocial costs as well

(Boden et al. 2001). However, an increasing body of lit-

erature suggests that these national statistics may be large

underestimates of the true prevalence of workplace injuries

and accidents due to organizational- and individual-level

underreporting of workplace accidents. Organizational ac-

cident underreporting occurs when an organization fails to

report injuries occurring at work to national regulatory

authorities (i.e., organizational underreporting), whereas

individual accident underreporting occurs when an em-

ployee fails to report work injuries to his/her employer

(i.e., individual underreporting).

Accident underreporting represents a serious individual,

organizational, and public health concern for a number of

reasons. For the individual employee, failure to report an

accident often results in the worker’s injury going untreated.

From the perspective of the employer, underreporting can

& Laura Petitta

[email protected]

Tahira M. Probst

[email protected]

Claudio Barbaranelli

[email protected]

1 Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome,

Via dei Marsi, 78, 00185 Rome, Italy

2 Washington State University Vancouver, 14204 NE Salmon

Creek Avenue, Vancouver, WA 98686-9600, USA

123

J Bus Ethics (2017) 141:489–504

DOI 10.1007/s10551-015-2694-1

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leave the root causes of employee accidents unaddressed and

unfixed possibly to crop up again in the future and affect

other employees. From a public health perspective, inaccu-

rate accident reporting undermines national surveillance

statistics and policy efforts to develop safer and healthier

workplaces.

Unfortunately, research suggests that a large majority

of experienced workplace accidents go unreported with

estimates of individual underreporting ranging from

71 % (Probst and Estrada 2010) to 80 % (Probst and

Graso 2013). While much of the prior research

documenting the phenomenon of underreporting has oc-

curred within the United States (e.g., Boden and Ozonoff

2008; Rosenman et al. 2006), recent research indicates

that individual-level underreporting is a prevalent issue

in Italy as well (Probst et al. 2013). Using two different

measures of individual-level underreporting, Probst et al.

(2013) found consistent results suggesting between 57

and 76 % of experienced workplace accidents went un-

reported in a sample of 563 employees drawn from 20

Italian organizations in a wide variety of high risk in-

dustrial sectors. Together, these studies suggest that

(a) underreporting is a commonplace occurrence among

employees who experience an accident at work, and

(b) (rightly or wrongly) employees perceive that non-

reporting is preferable to reporting.

As a result, a growing body of literature has been in-

vestigating psychosocial and organizational predictors of

such underreporting in an effort to increase the accuracy of

injury statistics (e.g., Probst et al. 2008; Probst and Estrada

2010; Probst and Graso 2013). From those studies, a num-

ber of person- and organizational-level factors appear to

partially explain why employees avoid reporting the in-

juries they experience (i.e., why individual-level underre-

porting occurs). These include variables such as

organizational safety climate (Probst and Estrada 2010),

perceived production pressure (Probst and Graso 2011), and

job insecurity (Probst et al. 2013). While the phenomenon

of underreporting has received a great deal of attention in

the United States (e.g., Pransky et al. 1999), Canada

(Shannon and Lowe 2002), and Australia (Quinlan and

Mayhew 1999), it has received less attention elsewhere.

With respect to Italy, several recent studies have investi-

gated the prevalence of occupational injuries in this coun-

try, yet little systematic research has been conducted on the

individual and organizational factors related to such injuries

(Fabiano et al. 2001, 2008) and the extent to which they are

reported.

The purpose of the current research was to add to this

knowledge base by examining the role of moral disen-

gagement (i.e., an individual-level factor) and organiza-

tional culture (i.e., an organizational-level factor) as

predictors of employee accident underreporting. Because

moral disengagement explains psychosocial mechanisms

by which individuals mitigate the moral consequences of

their misconduct (Bandura 1990), we assert that it may

operate as an important variable explaining why em-

ployees may choose to not report an experienced acci-

dent, despite such reporting often being mandatory

according to organizational policies and failure to report

can result in harm to oneself as well as one’s coworkers.

We also argue that it is important to place the occurrence

of moral disengagement within the context of the orga-

nizational culture, given that moral disengagement

mechanisms are internalized during organizational so-

cialization processes and co-determined by culture norms

(Bandura 2002; Bandura et al. 1996). Moreover, given

our focus on deviant behavior applied to the safety con-

text (i.e., failure to report an accident), we examine or-

ganizational culture norms regarding safety (i.e., safety

culture) as predictors of employee MD and subsequent

underreporting.

Using Rest’s (1986) model of ethical decision making as

a framework (see also Jones 1991), ethical safety behavior

requires first a recognition (i.e., moral awareness) by em-

ployees that their decision to report an accident has the

potential to help or harm others and that they have volition

in making the decision to report. We would argue that this

necessary but insufficient condition is typically met, given

the mandatory nature of safety reporting in organizations

and the fact that unreported accidents can increase the

likelihood that other employees may encounter the same

workplace hazards. Once moral awareness has been

established, employees next make an ethical judgment to

determine whether the ethical course of action (i.e., re-

porting the accident) is the appropriate next step. If yes,

then ethical intent is established and the likelihood of ac-

tually engaging in accident reporting behavior increases.

We argue that this ethical decision making process can

be short-circuited during the second (i.e., ethical judgment)

phase by the use of MD strategies. In addition, we contend

that organizational safety culture influences the extent to

which MD by employees occurs. Although MD has been

studied extensively in the social psychology realm, it has

received relatively scant attention from the business ethics

community (see Barsky 2011; Fida et al. 2014, in JBE for

recent exceptions). In particular, Barsky and others (e.g.,

Trevino 1986) argue that research on ethical decision

making and MD needs to emphasize to a greater extent the

interaction between the person and the situation (i.e., the

organizational context, including organizational culture) as

a cause of MD behavior. Thus, we believe that our study

contributes to the literature by a) showing that certain or-

ganizational safety culture types are predictive of MD

among employees, and b) this MD is related to greater

levels of underreporting among employees.

490 L. Petitta et al.

123

Prior research (Bandura et al. 2000) has shown that MD

strategies have been used to justify corporate-level safety

transgressions (e.g., insisting upon the safety of the Pinto

long after it was known to be unsafe). However, this is the

first study to demonstrate how organizational-level safety

culture can activate MD among individual employees and

subsequent accident underreporting. By examining the

conjoint influence of both individual- and organizational-

level factors that potentially contribute to such underre-

porting, we seek to gain a more complete understanding of

the reasons why employees avoid reporting experienced

injuries at work and to provide managerial suggestions on

how to encourage more accurate accident reporting in the

future.

We begin by briefly reviewing the literature on moral

disengagement, defining accident underreporting, and de-

lineating theory-based arguments regarding the relationship

between the two constructs. In particular, our review of the

literature on moral disengagement will focus on the con-

ceptual and empirical contributions pertaining to the work

setting and safety. Next, we discuss the theoretical con-

struct of organizational culture and apply a model of cul-

ture typologies to safety. We also develop hypotheses

regarding organizational culture as a predictor of moral

disengagement and accident underreporting.

A Review of Moral Disengagement and itsRelevance to Workplace Safety

Moral disengagement (MD) was first introduced by Ban-

dura (1990) to explain the psychosocial mechanisms by

which individuals mitigate the moral consequences of

damaging behaviors. Such mechanisms allow people to

disengage from moral self-sanctions associated with mis-

behavior, thus acting without feeling obliged to any kind of

reparation in spite of the individuals’ moral standards that

would normally serve to guide human conduct. Social

cognitive theory postulates an agentic role of the indi-

viduals in self-regulating their conduct. That is, people

develop self-regulatory functions in accordance with their

moral standards that ensue from the anticipatory positive

and negative self-reactions to different courses of actions

they pursue. In particular, such internal control allows the

individual to selectively disengage self-sanctions when

enacting damaging/detrimental behaviors. The four major

points in the self-regulatory system at which internal moral

control can be disengaged from detrimental conduct are (1)

re-construing the conduct, (2) obscuring personal causal

agency, (3) disregarding the injurious consequences of

one’s actions, and (4) vilifying the recipients of one’s

misbehavior by blaming and devaluating them. Overall,

MD neutralizes damaging conduct through eight different

psychological mechanisms, differently belonging to these

four major points. Briefly, cognitive reconstrual occurs

when the individuals redefine the detrimental conduct as

socially valuable and acceptable (moral justification);

when they compare their behaviors with more reprehensi-

ble actions (advantageous comparison); and/or when they

use convoluted verbiage to confer a respectable status to

reprehensible activities (euphemistic labeling). Obscuring

personal agency operates by attributing to others the

pressure to enact detrimental behavior (displacement of

responsibility), and/or by holding others around as re-

sponsible for damaging actions (diffusion of responsibility).

Disregarding the harmful consequences of one’s actions

refers to minimizing, and/or ignoring, and/or distorting the

damaging effects of one’s actions. Finally, vilifying the

recipients refers to divesting people of human qualities in

order to exonerate oneself from damaging others (dehu-

manization); and/or to attributing others provocative con-

duct thus justifying the inevitable harming reaction

(attribution of blame).

Although much of the work on MD has demonstrated

that MD may lower inhibition and is strongly associated

with several manifestations of aggressive behavior as well

as other forms of deviant conduct within the context of

decision making, family abuse, criminal pursuits, and

military and political settings (e.g., Aquino et al. 2007;

Bandura 2002; Bandura et al. 1996, 2001; Mayer et al.

2009), there have been a limited number of studies that

have investigated MD mechanisms within organizational

contexts. For example, MD has been found to be used at

the corporate level in order to neutralize organizational

responsibility for transgressive actions (Bandura et al.

2000; White et al. 2009). Of note, this stream of research

provided empirical support for the majority of the eight

MD mechanisms, but not all of them (e.g., diffusion of

responsibility did not emerge), although the investigation

was conducted at the organizational-level and targeted

corporate units/departments, rather than individual em-

ployees. The study of MD practices at the individual-level

has included research on general unethical behavior toward

others at work (Barsky 2011; Moore et al. 2012), as well as

other more specific instances of misconduct or unethical

behaviors. For example, recent research (Fida et al. 2014)

has examined the role of MD in self-exoneration for ap-

propriating the work of a colleague, justifying leaving work

without permission, and predicting counterproductive work

behaviors toward others (e.g., stealing something belong-

ing to another or insulting someone) or the organization

(e.g., purposely doing work incorrectly).

To our knowledge, the only study on MD specifically

applied to safety-related violations was conducted by Bar-

baranelli and Perna (2004). In particular, the authors de-

veloped a MD measure in order to assess the applicability of

Safety Culture, Moral Disengagement, and Accident Underreporting 491

123

MD mechanisms in relation to safety norms within the

workplace. Their research initially consisted of a pilot study

on 400 subjects who were administered 14 open-ended

questions exploring how they would behave in response to

specific safety risks and dangers. Consistent with prior re-

search (White et al. 2009), the content analysis identified

only six out the eight theorized mechanisms of MD

(specifically, moral justification; advantageous comparison;

displacement of responsibility; diffusion of responsibility;

distorting consequences; and attribution of blame). Their

second study provided evidence of the validity of a single

factor 30-item job safety MD (JS-MD) scale, which included

all the six mechanisms identified in the pilot study.

Given the demonstrated applicability of MD to the

workplace safety context, we next introduce the concept of

accident underreporting and explore the potential role of

MD in explaining why employees may fail to report acci-

dents they experience at work.

Accident Underreporting at Work and the Roleof Moral Disengagement

As alluded to earlier, accident underreporting at the indi-

vidual-level involves a comparison between the number of

experienced workplace accidents and the number of those

experienced workplace accidents that are actually reported

to the employer. As the discrepancy between the number of

reported and experienced accidents increases, underre-

porting can be said to increase (Probst and Graso 2011).

Thus, it is important to take into account the overall

number of experienced accidents relative to the number

reported, since both variables provide important informa-

tion regarding the employee’s workplace safety outcomes.

Probst and Graso (2011) also proposed that Behavioral

Reasoning Theory (BRT; Westaby 2005) might serve as a

useful theoretical framework for understanding how and

why individuals choose to underreport accidents at work.

Drawing upon behavioral intention theories (e.g., theory of

planned behavior; Ajzen 1991), BRT predicts behavior

based upon individual attitudes toward the behavior itself,

subjective norms (i.e., social pressure), and perceived

control (i.e., the ease/difficulty of enacting) over the be-

havior, but further expands upon such theories by incor-

porating context-specific reasons for and against specific

behaviors into the model. Westaby (2005) defined reasons

as ‘‘the specific subjective factors people use to explain

their anticipated behavior’’ (p. 100). According to BRT,

reasons serve as influential drivers of human behavior,

because they help people satisfy their needs to justify,

defend, and understand their behavioral decisions (Wes-

taby et al. 2010).

At the individual-level, there are many reasons proposed

as to why accidents may be underreported at work (e.g.,

fear of reprisals or loss of benefits, Webb et al. 1989;

Sinclair and Tetrick 2004). In a systematic examination of

reasons for not reporting, Probst and Estrada (2010) found

several common employee rationales that could be

indicative of MD mechanisms at work, i.e., reasons for

underreporting that serve to justify their non-compliance

with reporting requirements. In their study, over half of

employees who engaged in underreporting said they did

not think anything would be done to fix the problem; nearly

half (47.5 %) indicated they did not think it was that im-

portant. Both of these could be viewed as strategies to

weaken self-sanction by disregarding and minimizing the

consequences of actions that breach safety reporting re-

quirements. Employees also indicated not reporting acci-

dents because they did not want to be the one to break the

company’s safety record or adversely affect their work-

group’s safety performance. These latter two rationales

could be seen as attempts at cognitive reconstrual by re-

defining the detrimental conduct (underreporting) as so-

cially valuable (moral justification). Such self-deterrents

suppress the sense of guilt associated with violations

(Bandura 2002) and allow an individual to engage in

maladaptive safety behaviors.

In a study of copper miners, Probst and Graso (2013)

found that perceived organizational production pressure

was related to negative reporting attitudes and greater ac-

cident underreporting. Although they did not explicitly

examine MD as an explanatory mechanism for such un-

derreporting, it is possible that excessive production pres-

sure from the organization could lead to diffusion or

displacement of responsibility, i.e., ‘‘If my company cares

more about production than about my safety, why should I

care about accurate reporting?’’

Finally, in a two-country study, Probst et al. (2013)

found that perceived job insecurity was related not only to

increased numbers of experienced accidents, but also a

greater failure to accurately report those accidents. In their

discussion, they suggested that ‘‘employees may have a

stake in maintaining a safe image at work even as their

workplace experience of accidents and injuries increases as

a function of job insecurity’’ (p. 398). Again, while MD

was not specifically measured in that study, their results

indicated that employees were motivated to underreport in

an effort to retain their job, suggesting cognitive recon-

strual via advantageous comparison may be at work to

rationalize the underreporting (i.e., ‘‘Hiding an accident

may be wrong, but potentially losing my job would be

worse’’).

Based on moral disengagement theory and these prior

empirical results, we expect to find:


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Hypothesis 1 Job safety moral disengagement will be

positively related to higher accident underreporting in the

workplace.

Organizational Culture as a Contextual Influenceon Moral Disengagement and AccidentUnderreporting

According to social cognitive theory, MD mechanisms are

internalized during the socialization processes that regulate

moral standards of an individual. As such, MD is embed-

ded within and co-determined by cultural norms (Bandura

2002; Bandura et al. 1996). Organizational culture refers to

the members’ shared perceptions (Clarke 1999) of a com-

bination of widespread norms, values, beliefs and as-

sumptions that ‘‘tie’’ together individuals belonging to the

same context (Schein 1985). Organizational culture helps

individuals make sense of their work world and represents

a core group of shared set of assumptions, norms, and

patterns of behavior which orient organizational action.

Therefore, the culture of an organization is expected to

predict and explain how employees internalize organiza-

tional shared norms and how MD mechanisms develop at

the workplace. While organizations often have a prevailing

dominant culture (Rousseau and Fried 2001), there are also

numerous more specific dimensions of organizational cul-

ture related to characteristics such as decision making,

communication modalities, error management, and the

like. Because our interest is specifically in predicting ac-

cident underreporting, we focus on organizational safety

culture, i.e., attitudes, behaviors, values, and beliefs about

safety norms and regulations shared among organizational

members. Because organizational safety culture falls

within the larger concept of organizational culture, before

delving into the specific conceptual and operational fea-

tures of safety culture investigated in the present study, we

first introduce the theoretical frame that we used as a ref-

erence for organizational culture.

Our conceptualization of safety culture is based on a

combined typing and profiling conceptualization of orga-

nizational culture proposed by Petitta et al. (2014).

Specifically, this theoretical definition of culture was de-

veloped in line with (a) Enriquez’s (1970) identification of

a typology of organizational culture (i.e., autocratic, bu-

reaucratic, clan-patronage, technocratic, and cooperative);

(b) Schein’s (1985) model incorporating three embedded

levels of culture expression, ranging from the most visible

and external layer of organizational artifacts (e.g., lan-

guage, furniture, dress codes), to the deeper level of norms

and values that contribute to shape how artefacts are

manifested, and to the most ingrained basic assumptions

that members hold about their organizational reality and its

functioning; and (c) Payne’s (2000) multidimensional

model of cultural intensity and strength.

Building upon Enriquez (1970) typology of culture (e.g.,

autocratic, bureaucratic, clan-patronage, technocratic, and

cooperative), the Petitta et al. (2014) model of culture

conceptualizes the extent to which each culture type is

deeply rooted (i.e., intensity) and shared among organiza-

tional members (i.e., strength). Specifically, intensity con-

siders at progressively deeper levels, the extent to which

people within their organization (a) have a positive attitude

toward the cultural expression (i.e., attitude); (b) align their

behavior to that cultural expression (i.e., behavior); (c) be-

lieve it to be important (i.e., value); and finally, (d) con-

sider the cultural expression to be so deeply rooted that it

reflects a fundamentally accepted part of the organization

(i.e., ingrained belief). On the other hand, strength refers to

the extent to which these attitudes, behaviors, values, and

ingrained beliefs are shared and widespread among orga-

nizational members. As it will be described in the

‘‘Method’’ section, this conceptualization of safety culture

allows to measure members’ perception of both intensity

(i.e., progressively deeper layers) and strength (i.e., the

degree of pervasiveness of each cultural layer among

members) of organizational culture.

While Petitta et al. argued culture can vary on multiple

different organizational dimensions (e.g., organizational

communication, decision making, etc.), the focus of the

current study was on the dimension of safety culture. In an

autocratic safety culture, communication mainly flows

downwards and one’s own direct superior/leader (i.e., au-

thority) is the source of instructions and directions for

employees. Dialogue mainly consists of the delivery of

safety directives and feedback involves corrections which

highlight errors to avoid. In a bureaucratic safety culture,

the fundamental value is adherence to organizational safety

norms and regulations set by top level bureaucratic officials

(i.e., experts who develop norms also in line with local

government requirements). Individuals are expected to re-

spect roles and boundaries and to execute tasks without any

expectation of individual initiative beyond their role

definition. Within the clan-patronage safety culture, there

is a clear distinction between in-group and out-group

membership with in-group members privy to informal (yet

potent) bases of power. Individuals within the group act

differently in the presence of outsiders. This ‘‘two-faced’’

context provides members with different safety rules and

directions dependent upon their current interaction with

members of their inner circle versus more external people.

The technocratic safety culture is characteristic of contexts

which are result-oriented and focused on competition and

innovation. However, prioritizing achievement orientation

may result in safety violations if shortcuts to excellence

include skipping safety steps, or hiding errors, etc. Finally,


123

within a cooperative safety culture, value is given to the

achievement of consensus and the participation of all

members during decision making. An emphasis is placed

on the contributions of all individuals to collective safety

outcomes due to the organizational assumption that the

resultant whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Despite the lack of studies on the impact of organiza-

tional culture on individual safety-related MD, there is

some empirical evidence to suggest that during the so-

cialization process at work, employees will internalize

different moral standards and norms in relation to safety,

and that this will contribute to shape the mechanisms that

they subsequently use to justify the enactment of poor

safety behavior (in the current study, underreporting). For

example, White et al. (2009) found that industry standards

promoted the development of collective moral disengage-

ment which was related to the extent to which corporate

executives, lawyers, and public relations personnel justified

their actions regarding the dangers of secondhand smoke,

lead, silicosis, and vinyl chloride.

Given the exploratory and pilot nature of the current

study, we do not develop differential hypotheses on the

impact of specific safety culture typologies on MD.

Therefore, on the basis of the above arguments, we hy-

pothesize that:

Hypothesis 2 Different safety culture types will activate

varying levels of moral disengagement, which in turn will

be positively related to accident underreporting. That is,

moral disengagement mediates the relationship between

safety culture types and accident underreporting.

While we posit that the effects of culture on underre-

porting will be mediated by MD, there is also reason to

potentially expect direct effects of safety culture on acci-

dent underreporting. For example, organizational norms

and social pressure may serve as disincentives for indi-

vidual employees to report their accidents to company of-

ficials (Sinclair and Tetrick 2004). Landsbergis et al.

(1999) found that injury rates were higher in a variety of

industries that were implementing lean production cultures.

Further, Probst (2002) found that when employees were

threatened with layoffs, they chose to focus more on pro-

duction at the expense of safety. Additionally, misguided

safety incentive programs (Probst and Graso 2013) may

foster punitive vs. non-punitive consequences for not re-

porting an accident and encourage/discourage employees’

behavior toward violation of safety standards.

Thus, we also test an alternative model positing the

follow:

Hypothesis 3 Safety culture types will predict accident

underreporting, both directly and indirectly through moral

disengagement.

Method

Participants and Procedure

Surveys were administered to 1033 employees from 28

different organizations in Italy. The mean organizational

sample size was 70 employees (SD = 30) and ranged from

5 to 110. Seventy percent of the companies were private

and 30 % were public. Together, these organizations rep-

resent a wide range of industry sectors where safety com-

pliance is a paramount concern, including manufacturing,

construction, transportation, military, and health care. In

the overall sample, 79.9 % of respondents were male,

18.1 % female, with 2 % leaving the item blank. The av-

erage age was 40.43 years (SD = 10.48), and the average

tenure in the position was 12.93 years (SD = 9.59). Also,

84.3 % were permanent workers, 13.7 % were contingent

workers, with 2 % leaving the item blank. Ten percent held

the role of supervisor/manager whereas about 86 % were

non-managers, with 3.8 % leaving the item blank. Fur-

thermore, managers/supervisors in our sample were dis-

tributed across most organizations (18 out of 28

organizations).

The research team approached administrators within

each organization to request their organization’s par-

ticipation in the study. Upon reaching agreement on par-

ticipation, the research team provided information sessions

at each organizational location to describe the project,

encourage participation, and address concerns from po-

tential participants. Participation was voluntary and

anonymous. The research team distributed questionnaires

which the majority of participants completed that same

day. In some instances, employees were allowed up to two

weeks to complete the survey at home and return it in a

sealed envelope to the research team.

Measures

Below is a description of the measures used to provide data

for the current analyses.

Safety Culture

To measure safety culture, we utilized the 20-item job

safety sub-scale of the Intensity & Strength Organizational

Culture Questionnaire (JS-I&SOCQ; Petitta et al. 2014).

This sub-scale measures the five cultural typologies (au-

tocratic, bureaucratic, clan-patronage, technocratic, and

cooperative) within a safety context. Respondents are first

provided the following prompts describing each of the

cultural typologies with safety as the frame of reference:

‘‘With respect to enacting safety behaviors that are


123

indicated by the boss…’’ (autocratic); ‘‘With respect to

strictly adhering to the rules and safety procedures pro-

posed by the organization…’’ (bureaucratic); ‘‘With re-

spect to following one set of safety rules when you are with

outsiders but following different practices within the

group…’’ (clan-patronage); ‘‘With respect to following the

safety practices only if this doesn’t impede the achieve-

ment of the result and the progress of the work…’’ (tech-

nocratic); and ‘‘With respect to proactively involving all

members of the organization in the diffusion and adoption

of safety practices…’’ (cooperative). After viewing the

prompts, respondents indicate how many people (ranging

from 1 = almost no one to 4 = almost everyone) from

their organization (1) manifest a positive attitude toward

the cultural typology, (2) engage in behavior that is in line

with the cultural typology, (3) attribute importance to the

cultural typology, and (4) consider the cultural typology so

fundamental as to consider it deeply ingrained in the or-

ganizational texture.

Thus, the progressively deeper intensity of safety culture

layers could vary from low (attitudes) to high (deeply

rooted belief), whereas the strength of the safety culture is

reflected in estimates of how many people express that

cultural feature/layer (e.g., almost no one to almost ev-

eryone). The overall score of each culture type (e.g., au-

tocratic) is the averaging of the answers provided to

progressively deeper (intensity) culture layers (e.g., auto-

cratic attitude, autocratic behavior, autocratic value, and

autocratic deeply rooted belief) within that specific culture

type. Therefore, higher mean scores of autocratic, bu-

reaucratic, clan-patronage, technocratic, and cooperative

dimensions are interpreted to reflect a greater manifestation

(i.e., in terms of both intensity and strength) of that cultural

typology within the employees’ organization. Previous

research on the JS-I&SOCQ (Petitta et al. 2012, 2014)

reported excellent scale reliability and construct validity.

Safety Moral Disengagement

Moral disengagement related to workplace safety normswas

measured using a shortened 12-item version of the unidi-

mensional Job Safety Moral Disengagement scale (JS-MD;

Barbaranelli and Perna 2004). Items from this version were

carefully developed following the guidelines and the word-

ing of other scales produced in the literature for measuring

moral disengagement (e.g., Bandura et al. 1996; Caprara

et al. 2009). Each item clearly reflects a specific moral dis-

engagement mechanism. However, as it is common in the

literature on moral disengagement, from a factorial point of

view items in this scale reflect a singlemoral disengagement

latent dimension, and the six mechanisms are not separable.

As noted above, this is a very common result, obtained also

when MD is measured in adolescent aggression domain

(Bandura et al. 1996), in everyday life transgressions

(Caprara et al. 2009), and in general unethical behavior to-

ward others at work (Barsky 2011; Moore et al. 2012).

The abbreviated version of the scale was developed

based on the published item factor loadings reported by

Barbaranelli and Perna (2004). For each of the six MD

mechanisms (i.e., moral justification; advantageous com-

parison; displacement of responsibility; diffusion of re-

sponsibility; distorting consequences; and attribution of

blame), the two items showing the highest loadings within

each mechanism were selected resulting in a final short-

ened scale of 12 items. A sample item is ‘‘Safety checks are

useless, because most machines will eventually malfunc-

tion’’ and response options ranged from 1 = Strongly

Disagree to 5 = Strongly Agree. Table 2 in Appendix 1

reports the complete short-version of the JS-MD scale used

in the present study.

Accident Underreporting

Using a measure developed by Smecko and Hayes (1999),

employees were asked to indicate how many safety acci-

dents they experienced and reported to appropriate com-

pany officials and how many accidents they had

experienced but not reported to appropriate company of-

ficials over the past 12 months. Although the workplace

accident variables were self-report in nature, previous

studies do indicate that self-report measures of accidents

and unsafe behaviors are related to independent observa-

tions of these variables (Lusk et al. 1995).

In order to ensure consistent interpretation of the ques-

tion, we provided the following definitions for the terms

used in the items. Accident: An unplanned and uncontrolled

event that led to injury to persons, damage to proper-

ty/plant/equipment, or some other loss to the company.

Reported event: A safety incident that was reported to a

company official (e.g., supervisor, manager, safety offi-

cial). Unreported event: A safety incident that was NOT

reported to any company official.

Using these data, we could compute the total number of

experienced accidents relative to the number actually re-

ported. Accident underreporting was then operationalized

as the proportion of the total number of experienced acci-

dents that went unreported to the organization. To avoid

zeros in the denominator, a very small constant (.00001)

was added to the denominator (Tabachnick and Fidell

2007). Due to high skewness and kurtosis, this variable was

then considered as ‘‘censored’’ in the following analyses.

Control Variables

We included the respondents’ type of contract (i.e., per-

manent vs contingent) as a control variable because


123

literature (Quinlan 1999) suggests contingent workers are

less likely than permanent workers to report accidents.

Item responses were coded as follows: permanent was

scored 0; and contingent was scored 1. Furthermore,

while both managers and non-managers must report ac-

cidents (e.g., European Agency for Safety and Health at

Work; EU-OSHA, 2014; Occupational Safety and Health

Administration; OSHA, 1993), managers take on the re-

sponsibility of observing employees on the job, investi-

gating incidents, and reporting accidents as part of their

normal supervisory role. Therefore, the type of position

may affect the accident reporting behavior. The coding

was respectively 0 for non-managers, and 1 for managers

(i.e., supervisor, manager). Finally, our sample included

organizations from both public and private sectors. Be-

cause safety processes might be more mandatorily applied

and controlled in the context of public administration, we

included respondents’ belongingness to different organi-

zation types as a control variable. The coding was, re-

spectively, 0 for public and 1 for private organization

type.

Data Analysis Approach

The resulting data for this study were hierarchical in

nature with people nested within organizations. Because

such data are non-independent, they can result in artifi-

cially low estimates of standard errors. To rectify this,

the common data analytic approach would be to use

multilevel modeling. However, the number of organiza-

tions in our sample was limited to only 28, whereas

researchers (e.g., Heck and Thomas 2000; Hox 2002)

have recommended a minimum of 50–100 groups to

obtain reliable multilevel-SEM results. Therefore, we

used a different approach that statistically takes into

account the hierarchical structure of our data, while also

being consistent with the literature’s recommendations

related to the level-2 sample size. Specifically, we used

the ‘‘TYPE = COMPLEX’’ procedure within MPLUS

(Muthen and Muthen 1998–2012). This MPLUS com-

mand produces corrected parameters estimates, standard

errors, and test statistics in the presence of multilevel

interdependency.

Results

Measurement Model

In order to test the factorial validity of the JS-IS&OCQ

and the shortened version of the JS-MD, a preliminary

confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) tested the fit of a six

latent variables’ structure (i.e., five cultural typologies

and JS-MD) measured by the 32 observed variables. The

model was tested on the covariance matrix using the

Maximum Likelihood Robust estimation method. Next,

we compared the fit of the six-factor model against a one-

factor model in which each item loaded onto a single

factor.

Results from the six-factor CFA showed excellent fit

indices: v2 (409, N = 1032) = 982.118, p\ .001,

RMSEA = .037 (.034; .040), CFI = .95, TLI = .95, with

factor loadings all significant and above .51 with the ex-

ception of one item of MD which displayed a factor loading

of .25. Therefore, we dropped this item and again ran the

six-factor CFA measured by the remaining 31 observed

variables. Results from the second CFA still showed ex-

cellent fit indices: v2 (379, N = 1033) = 914.648, p\ .001,

RMSEA = .037 (.034; .040), CFI = .96, TLI = .95, with

factor loadings all significant and ranging from .65 to .92 for

culture factors, and from .51 to .72 for MD. Additionally,

correlations among the latent JS-MD and culture factors

ranged from .12 to .35. On the other hand, correlations

among the five culture factors ranged from .02 to .72. Fi-

nally, results from the one-factor CFA showed inadequate fit

indices: v2 (394, N = 1033) = 7999.334, p\ .001,

RMSEA = .137 (.134; .139), CFI = .39, TLI = .28. Taken

together, these results demonstrated the appropriateness of

the six hypothesized latent factors and the distinctiveness of

JS-MD and the safety culture typologies.

Descriptive Statistics and Correlations

Means, standard deviations, alpha coefficients, and zero-

order correlations among the scales are reported in

Table 1. As shown in the diagonal of this table, each

study variable has a good degree of internal consistency

reliability (Cronbach’s alpha), ranging from .86 to .93.

Zero-order correlations were calculated at the indi-

vidual- and organizational-levels and suggest interesting

preliminary patterns of relationships. In support of

Hypothesis 1, we see that higher use of safety-related

MD mechanisms is significantly related to higher levels

of employee accident underreporting behaviors both at

the individual- (r = .16, p\ .01) and organizational-

level (r = .54, p\ .01). In partial support of Hy-

pothesis 2, technocratic safety culture is positively

correlated with higher levels of JS-MD both at the in-

dividual- (r = .33, p\ .01) and organizational-level

(r = .46, p\ .05). Finally, type of contract, organiza-

tion type, and type of position showed some significant

correlations with accident underreporting and MD.

Hence, based on these patterns of relationships, these

control variables were included in the subsequent

structural models.


123

Structural Models

In order to more rigorously test our hypotheses, a first

structural equation model (Model 1) was performed using

the WLSMV method of estimation. This method produces

correct parameter estimates and goodness of fit indices in

presence of censored variables, such as the accident un-

derreporting measure included in the model. Again, due to

the multilevel structure of data, in order to obtain an ap-

propriate correction for standard errors, we used the

TYPE = COMPLEX procedure in Mplus. In this model,

no direct effects were posited among the five culture

variables and accidents underreporting; rather we posited

that the effect of safety culture on accident underreporting

would be fully mediated by MD.

The model1 showed an adequate fit to the data: v2 (484,N = 922) = 540.278, p\ .05, RMSEA = .011 (.003;

.016), CFI = .95, TLI = .94. As can be seen in Fig. 1,

there were low to moderate correlations amongst the dif-

ferent cultural types with significant correlations ranging

from .19 (clan-patronage and cooperative) to .73 (bureau-

cratic and autocratic). To the extent that multiple culture

types potentially co-exist in the same context, this might

indicate that a link among these culture types is possible

when normative safety culture schemas (i.e., Bureaucratic)

are potentially conveyed by the supervisor (i.e., Autocratic)

or by proactive involvement of all members of the orga-

nization (i.e., Cooperative).

As predicted by Hypothesis 1, MD exerted a positive

significant effect of .24 (p\ .01) on accident underre-

porting.2 In support of Hypothesis 2, after controlling for

type of contract (permanent vs. contingent), job position

(non manager vs. manager), and type of organization

(public vs. private), technocratic safety culture exerted a

significant and positive effect of .37 (p\ .001) on MD,

while bureaucratic safety culture exerted a significant but

negative effect of -.16 (p\ .001). All other effects on MD

were not statistically significant.

Technocratic safety culture and bureaucratic safety

culture exerted indirect effects on accident underreporting

through MD, respectively, of .09 (p\ .01) and -.04

(p\ .01). The remaining Autocratic, Clan-Patronage, and

Cooperative Safety Cultures exerted no significant indirect

effects on accident underreporting through MD, respec-

tively, of -.011 (p = 433), .001 (p = 863), and -.006

Table 1 Descriptive statistics, correlations, and Cronbach’s alphas

Variable Mean SD 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

1. Permanent versus

contingent

.14 .35 - -.27 .47* -.43* -.27 -.15 .06 -.29 .23 .24

2. Non manager versus

manager

.11 .31 -.07* – -.53* -.23 -.26 -.36 -.32 -.29 -.27 -.33

3. Public versus private .70 .46 -.19** -.25** – .02 -.02 .20 .12 .05 .24 .30

4. Autocratic culture 2.82 .73 -.07* -.02 -.01 (.86) .79** .38* -.04 .69** -.10 -.18

5. Bureaucratic culture 2.89 .73 -.09** .03 -.04 .67** (.87) .46* -.01 .83** .04 .15

6. Clan-patronage culture 2.44 .84 -.03 -.03 -.03 .20** .21** (.92) .69** .64** .27 .38*

7. Technocratic culture 2.21 .88 .06* -.05* -.05 .04 .04 .49** (.93) .24 .46* .42*

8. Cooperative culture 2.73 .77 -.11* -.03 -.02 .51** .51** .18** .05 (.89) .29 .34

9. Moral disengagement 1.93 .75 .09** -.14** .09** -.14** -.16** .14** .33** -.11** (.88) .54**

10. Accident underreporting .06 .22 .03 -.05 .10** -.02 .01 .03 .09** .03 .16** –

Correlations below the diagonal are at the individual-level (listwise n = 922), whereas those above the diagonal are at the organizational-level

(N = 28). Mean and SD are reported at the individual-level; Cronbach’s alpha is reported along the diagonal in brackets

* p\ .05; ** p\ .01

1 Because we utilized a convenience sample, we also tested our

results controlling for age and gender. Gender was the only variable

significantly correlated with both accident underreporting and MD.

Therefore, it was tested as an additional control variable in our

hypothesized structural model. Notably, our results did not change

after controlling for this sample demographic (results are available

upon request to the authors). Therefore, we can rule out the

hypothesis that these demographics are potential convenience sample

bias that exert a significant influence on the activation of MD or

accident underreporting.

2 Because not all employees experienced a workplace accident, we

ran an alternative regression analysis to test whether the strength and

direction of the relationship between MD and underreporting

remained consistent when restricting our sample to only include

those individuals who actually experienced a workplace accident.

After controlling for type of contract, public versus private sector, and

managerial status, we found that MD remained a significant predictor

of underreporting, F(1, 153) = 7.52, p\ .007, DR2 = .05. Notably,

the beta coefficient was .22, which is nearly identical with the SEM

results reported using the full sample where the path coefficient was

.24.


123

(p = 660). Finally, none of the control variables exerted a

significant effect on accident underreporting, whereas the

type of position was the only control variable exerting a

significant (p\ .05) and negative (-.18) effect on MD.

That is, lower levels of MD were associated to respondents

holding the role of manager/supervisor. Overall, the model

explained the 21 % of MD variance and the 14 % of ac-

cident underreporting variance.

In order to test Hypothesis 3, a second alternative

structural equation model (Model 2) was performed that

modeled the direct and indirect effects among the five

culture variables and accident underreporting. This model

showed an adequate fit to the data: v2 (479,

N = 922) = 535.093, p\ .05, RMSEA = .011 (.003;

.016), CFI = .95, TLI = .94. Furthermore, results from the

Chi square test for difference testing between Model 1 and

Model 2 were not significant (Dv2 (5, N = 922) = 7.274,

p = .201). Because the two models showed the same level

of fit to the data, Model 1 was preferable given its greater

parsimony (Preacher 2006). Therefore, the final results are

those reported in Model 1 and shown in Fig. 1.

Discussion

While the popular press tends to focus on high-profile in-

stances of individuals ‘‘faking’’ workplace injuries in order

to falsely receive workers compensation or extended dis-

ability payments, the reality is that accident underreporting

is a far more prevalent phenomenon with estimates sug-

gesting up to 80 % of experienced accidents go unreported

(Probst et al. 2008; Probst and Graso 2013). Such under-

reporting has numerous adverse consequences for em-

ployees, employing organizations, and society at large. For

the affected employee, failure to report an accident often

results in the worker’s injury going untreated. From an

organizational perspective, underreporting can leave the

root causes of employee accidents unaddressed and unfixed

possibly to crop up again in the future and affect other

employees. From a societal perspective, inaccurate acci-

dent reporting undermines national public health surveil-

lance statistics and impedes policy efforts to develop safer

and healthier workplaces. Thus, it is important to develop a

more comprehensive theoretical understanding of the rea-

sons why employees may engage in such behavior.

The literature suggests that there are both person- and

organizational-level factors that explain why employees

avoid reporting the workplace accidents they experience

(Probst and Graso 2011). Given that accident reporting is

typically mandatory in organizations and not considered a

discretionary behavior (Probst 2013), failure to report an

experienced accident can be considered a form of safety

non-compliance. Therefore, the primary purpose of the

current study was to contribute to the growing literature on

underreporting by exploring the role of both MD (an in-

dividual-level factor) and organizational culture (an orga-

nizational-level factor) as predictors of employee accident

underreporting. In doing so, we sought to gain a better

understanding of the antecedents and mechanisms by

which employees avoid reporting experienced workplace

accidents.

The results from our study suggest that organizational

safety culture serves as an antecedent that differentially

predicts the activation of safety-related MD among em-

ployees. In particular, organizational contexts pervaded by

bureaucratic enforcement of safety norms (i.e., bureau-

cratic safety culture) were related to lower levels of em-

ployee MD. Conversely, a technocratic safety culture (in

AutocraticCulture

BureaucraticCulture

Clan-PatronageCulture

TechnocraticCulture

CooperativeCulture

MoralDisengagement

AccidentUnder-reporting

.73***

.21***

.21***

.52***

.61***

.54***

.19***

-.16***

.37**

.24**

R²=.21 R²=.14

ORG. TYPE POSITIONCONTRACT

-.18*

Fig. 1 Results from the final

structural model (Model 1).

Note *p\ .05, **p\ .01,

***p\ .001. Dotted lines are

non significant effects. ORG.

TYPE organization type


123

which safety practices are only followed if they do not

impede achievement of desired production outcomes) ap-

pears to be related to higher employee disengagement from

the safety-related moral consequences, which in turn was

related to increased accident underreporting.

Interestingly, MD fully mediated the relationship be-

tween safety culture and accident underreporting. This

indicates that safety culture does not have a direct effect

on accident reporting behaviors, but rather has its influ-

ence via the role that culture plays in shaping safety-

related moral disengagement. Consistent with literature on

the development of MD in other settings (Bandura 2002),

employees actively elaborate the shared contextual norms

and develop strategies that enable them to violate such

norms and self-exonerate from the responsibilities of their

safety misconduct. These results were obtained after

controlling for type of contract (permanent vs. contin-

gent), job position (non manager vs. manager), and type

of organization (public vs. private), none of which exerted

a significant effect on accident underreporting. Taken

together, our findings confirm that it is important to si-

multaneously consider both context- and individual-level

variables when explaining safety violations, and add to

that literature by demonstrating the important roles of

organizational culture and MD mechanisms in predicting

employee accident underreporting.

Theoretical Implications

Our findings make several novel contributions to the

extant literatures in two distinct areas—MD and occu-

pational safety. As noted above, this is the first study to

merge these two streams of research to investigate the

extent to which JS-MD predicts employee accident un-

derreporting. The results of our study suggest that MD

mechanisms which allow people to mitigate the moral

consequences of misconduct (Bandura 1999) may explain

individual variation in the enactment of underreporting.

Moreover, the results of the current study also highlight

the potentially important role played by safety culture in

activating these MD mechanisms and increasing the

likelihood of subsequent underreporting. While there is a

robust literature on the relationship between safety cul-

ture and climate and employee safety outcomes, the

present study is the first to explore MD as an explana-

tory mechanism for that link. To our knowledge, current

safety climate and culture theories have not looked at

MD as a mediating variable, but rather focus on safety

knowledge and motivation as individual-level mediators

linking culture and climate to safety performance (e.g.,

Neal et al. 2000). While safety culture and climate can

certainly shape knowledge and motivation, our research

indicates that culture is also related to the propensity for

individual employees to morally disengage from their

organizational duty to accurately report workplace acci-

dents. Such safety-related MD includes justifying safety

violations due to a) perceived benefits (moral justifica-

tion), b) social pressures to produce (distorting conse-

quences), and/or c) placing blame elsewhere (attribution

of blame).

Our study also responds to prior calls for a better

understanding of how moral disengagement is situa-

tionally motivated (Shu et al. 2011), i.e., determining

the specific contextual factors that trigger MD

mechanisms such as organizational culture (Fida et al.

2014). While the literature on MD mechanisms has long

suggested that they are internalized during the social-

ization process that regulates moral standards of an

individual, and are co-determined by culture norms

(Bandura 1990), our study is the first to explore the role

of organizational culture (i.e., a context-level factor) as

a predictor of MD mechanisms applied to organiza-

tional settings, and specifically to safety at the work-

place. In particular, the five-typology model of safety

culture (i.e., autocratic, bureaucratic, clan-patronage,

technocratic, and cooperative) proposed in the current

study allowed us to examine the likelihood of MD

activation as a function of the strength and intensity of

these culture types. Specifically, we found that bu-

reaucratic safety culture attitudes, behaviors, values, and

beliefs shared among organizational members appeared

to provide a protective factor from MD justifications.

Conversely, shared attitudes, behaviors, values, and

beliefs indicative of a technocratic safety culture ap-

peared to be a risk factor for the emergence of MD. As

Probst and Graso (2013) noted, research has shown that

employees often view the organizational demands of

safety and production as competitive in nature. Hence,

organizations which place an emphasis on production at

the expense of safety may foster a Technocratic Culture

in which employees share the perception that the safety

risks are worth the potential rewards accrued by a focus

on production. As a result, the Technocratic Culture

may become a contextual factor that triggers MD

mechanisms.

Finally, our results contribute to research on social

cognitive theory (Bandura 1986). Our finding that MD

fully mediates the relationship between safety culture and

accident underreporting is consistent with the agentic na-

ture of individuals posited by Bandura (Ibid.), and further

expands its application to safety misconduct. That is, in-

dividuals actively elaborate shared contextual norms and

develop strategies that may more (or less) enable them to

violate such norms and self-exonerate from the responsi-

bilities of their violations from the responsibilities of their

safety violations. Our results also support the interactionist


123

(i.e., individual-environment) perspective suggesting that

individuals internalize contextual norms and shape them in

ways that help them to disengage from the sense of guilt

associated with their safety violations. Accident underre-

porting appears to be fostered by a technocratic safety

culture, yet this effect is exerted only through the devel-

opment of moral justifications for engaging in behaviors

that sacrifice safety. Conversely, underreporting appears to

be discouraged by bureaucratic organizational contexts

which emphasize rigorous adoption of safety procedures.

Again, this effect is exerted through a reduction in MD.

Practical Implications

The findings of our study are of practical relevance from

several standpoints. First, as noted earlier, the economic

costs of workplace accidents account for 2.8 % of the gross

domestic product (GDP) in Italy (Eurispes 2010). Our

study demonstrated that the combined effects of organi-

zational culture and MD account for 14 % of accident

underreporting. While this may seem like a relatively small

proportion of variance explained, interventions to modify

the organizational culture and reduce the subsequent en-

actment of MD have the potential to significantly reduce

the high social and economic costs of workplace injuries

and underreporting.

Our inclusion of organizational culture, and particularly

five specific patterns of safety culture, is also in line with

the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-

OSHA) preventive initiatives (e.g., Working together for

risk prevention, EU-OSHA, 2013) that focus on the im-

portance of joint management and employee involvement

in injury prevention programs. Our study indicates that a

bureaucratic safety culture discourages employees to

morally disengage from safety violations, whereas a tech-

nocratic safety culture is predictive of higher employee

MD. Therefore, management and employees should be

made aware of the specific influence that their organiza-

tional culture may have on the development of MD

mechanisms and subsequent underreporting. Our findings

suggest that enhancing bureaucratic features related to

safety enforcement and de-emphasizing technocratic fea-

tures related to production pressure at the expense of safety

may help decrease the activation of safety-related MD and

subsequent underreporting behaviors.

While modifying existing culture patterns is challenging,

research suggests interventions should focus on changing

programs that crystallize the organization’s beliefs and be-

haviors (DeJoy 2005). Furthermore, given the deeply rooted

nature of shared organizational culture beliefs (Schein

1985), intervention effectiveness assessment should evalu-

ate the extent to which the safety culture may be affected at

multiple levels within the organization, i.e., employees, su-

pervisors/middle management, and top management. Fi-

nally, our results indicate that safety-related training

programs might also fruitfully aim to enhance employees’

awareness of their own moral reasoning and the specific

strategies (i.e.,MDmechanisms) they use to developmorally

disengaged thinking. Such self-awareness is the first step to

recognizing their own use of MD, as well as MD enacted by

other organizational members. In conclusion, by better un-

derstanding the conjoint influence of safety culture typolo-

gies and employee safety-related MD, organizations may be

able to more effectively focus their safety improvement

efforts.

Strengths, Limitations, and Future Directions

In addition to the theoretical and practical contributions

noted above, there are other notable strengths of the current

study. First, the large and diverse samples drawn from awide

variety of organizations in at-risk industry sectors afford

greater confidence in the external generalizability of the

current findings. Additionally, by correcting for the non-in-

dependence of employees nested within organizations, we

were better able to estimate the effect sizes relating culture,

MD, and accident underreporting.

Despite these strengths, it is also important to recognize

the limitations of our study in order to promote future re-

search that can further build upon our work. First, as with

much occupational health psychology research, our study

relies on a convenience sample to test our hypotheses, and

on self-report data. Such self-report measures of accidents

and accident reporting could be misleading due to im-

pression management goals of the employee and/or other

incentives for employees to respond to survey questions

about reporting in a specific way. However, it is important

to reiterate that the data collected in the study were com-

pletely anonymous and employees knew individual data

would not be shared with supervisors or management.

Notably, in the current study, we found that across the

entire sample, employees indicated they failed to report

247 accidents out of a total of 485 accidents actually ex-

perienced. This alone suggests that while employees may

not be willing to tell their employer about all of their ac-

cidents, they were willing to tell us as researchers. More-

over, previous research indicates that self-report measures

of accidents and unsafe behaviors are related to indepen-

dent observations of these variables (Lusk et al. 1995). In

comparing self-ratings and observer ratings of employee


123

use of hearing protection, they found that these were highly

correlated (.89) concluding that self-reports of safety-re-

lated behavior are appropriate and ‘‘may be the best choice

when time and monetary resources restrict measurement to

one indicator.’’ Nevertheless, future research could address

this question empirically by evaluating the extent to which

social desirable responding is related to employee levels of

underreporting.

A second limitation concerns the cross-sectional nature

of the data. Although this study provides an initial test of

the proposed relationships, longitudinal research would

allow us to more rigorously test the causal direction of our

hypothesized relationships, as well as how the effects of

organizational safety culture on MD may unfold over time.

For example, longitudinal research could better delineate

the potentially recursive relationships between culture

norms and MD mechanisms proposed by social cognitive

theory (Bandura 2002). In other words, while internalized

cultural norms may prompt the development of MD, sub-

sequent behavior (e.g., accident underreporting) may in

turn further shape the cultural content.

Moreover, although our analytic approach accounted for

the nested nature of our data by correcting the standard

errors of organizational culture, future research obtaining a

larger number of organizations would allow for an even

more rigorous test of the model within a full multilevel

approach. Also, our study targeted organizations in at-risk

of injuries sectors, yet future research using other survey

data collected from additional and different at-risk pro-

fessional groups should be conducted in the future to

provide further support for the study’s findings. Along a

similar vein, the current research while relying on a data

from a diverse set of organizations and industry sections

nevertheless represents only a single national context

(Italy). Therefore, it would be good to replicate our find-

ings in other countries, and in particular countries that may

differ on potentially relevant national cultural dimensions,

such as individualism/collectivism, power distance, and

uncertainty avoidance.

Finally, with respect to ethics specifically, one inter-

esting avenue for future research would be to expand our

multilevel framework to include the direct impact of one’s

supervisor. While the current study was focused on the

contextual effects at the organizational-level, it would also

be important to consider the role of supervisor ethics and

safety leadership. Supervisors serve as the interface be-

tween upper management and the individual employees

and help to ‘‘translate’’ the espoused organizational culture

into enacted aspects (Zohar and Luria 2003). Therefore,

future research could further develop hypotheses regarding

potential mediating and/or moderating roles played by su-

pervisor leadership in the activation of MD mechanisms.

Conclusions

Despite these limitations, the current research is the first to

empirically demonstrate that safety-related MD mechan-

isms predict employee accident underreporting behaviors.

Our study is also the first to explore the role of organiza-

tional culture (i.e., a context-level factor) as a predictor of

MD mechanisms in a variety of organizational settings and

industries. By demonstrating that certain cultural typolo-

gies (particularly bureaucratic and technocratic) are dif-

ferentially related to the enactment of safety-related MD

and subsequent accident underreporting, we contributed to

the extant literatures in these areas by identifying a new

mechanism by which culture impacts employee safety be-

havior. Whereas previous research has focused on the im-

pact of culture and climate on employee levels of safety

knowledge and motivation as predictors of safety perfor-

mance, our research suggests that another potentially im-

portant explanatory mechanism is the impact of culture on

employee MD. As such, our findings add to our theoretical

and practical knowledge regarding the individual and

contextual factors influencing employee safety in the

workplace.

Appendix 1

See Table 2.


123

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Table 2 Job safety MD scale items

JS-MD scale

Italian version English version

1. Il servizio di prevenzione e protezione non serve a nulla: gli

incidenti capitano a chi e disattento

1. Safety prevention is useless; accidents happen to those who are

inattentive

2. E giusto che i datori non facciano applicare le norme di sicurezza,

se questo garantisce un risparmio e dei salari piu elevati

2. It is ok if employers avoid enforcing safety rules, especially if it

results in savings and higher wages.

3. E inutile un controllo sulle attrezzature perche anche dopo i

controlli molte macchine non funzionano bene

3. Safety checks are useless, because most machines will eventually

malfunction

4. Non ha senso che il singolo lavoratore applichi le norme di

sicurezza, dal momento che queste andrebbero applicate a livello

collettivo

4. Individual workers are not responsible for any failure to enforce

safety policies if everyone in the company does not comply

5. Tutti i giorni si corrono dei gravi rischi per la salute: non vale la

pena preoccuparsi di quelli relativi alla sicurezza sul lavoro

5. Serious safety risks are taken every day; therefore, it is worthless to

worry about workplace safety

6. Non ha senso punire i singoli lavoratori che non applicano le misure

di sicurezza: o si puniscono tutti o nessuno

6. It does not make sense to single out individual workers who fail to

comply with the safety rules; either everyone who breaks the rules

should be punished or no one

7. Un addetto qualificato deve occuparsi dell’applicazione delle norme

sulla sicurezza, non e compito dei singoli lavoratori

7. Designated officials should be responsible for safety in the

workplace; it is not the responsibility of individual workers

8. I lavoratori dovrebbero occuparsi di cose piu serie e non di piccoli

difetti ai dispositivi

8. Employees have more serious things to be preoccupied with than

minor machinery malfunctions

9. Le norme sulla sicurezza sono esagerate in realta molti lavori non

sono cosı pericolosi come sembra

9. Safety risks are exaggerated; most work is not as dangerous as

portrayed

10. Un lavoratore non puo essere incolpato se non vengono applicate

le norme sulla sicurezza, di questo devono occuparsi i suoi capi

10. Individual employees should not be blamed if safety rules are not

followed; this is the responsibility of their boss

11. Chi non e attento sul lavoro deve dare la colpa a se stesso/a se

subisce un incidente

11. Those who are inattentive at work should blame themselves if they

have an accident

12. Per essere piu competitive sul mercato e giusto che le aziende

taglino i costi per la sicurezza

12. It is ok for companies to cut their safety budget in order to be more

competitive in the market


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