Safety motivation and human resource management in North America

Approximately 4.2 million Americans suffered nonfatal work-related injuries and 6,000 workers died of fatal work-related injuries in the US in 2005 (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2007). Given these numbers, employee safety continues to be a concern in organizations despite engineering advances that have reduced exposures over the past few decades. Many factors contribute to workplace safety. These include characteristics of the physical environment and human behaviour within that environment. Human behaviour on some level plays a role in the vast majority of workplace accidents and injuries. This can include risky behaviour and signal detection failures, as well as a lack of proactive and collective safety behaviours that focus on changing the work environment to increase safety. Although several predictors of safety-related behaviour have been identified, there are some unresolved issues with respect to safety performance in organizations. This article focuses on the behaviours that compose safety performance, the factors that contribute to human safety performance, particularly those related to motivation, and some potential new areas of research in safety motivation in organizations.