Three Essays on Corporate Safety Management and Workers’ Safety Behavior

Abstract

Three Essays on Corporate Safety Management and Workers’ Safety Behavior - Focused on Manufacturing Industry - Lim, Junghoon Major in Management Consulting Dept. of Knowledge Service & Consulting The Graduate School Hansung University This dissertation deals with safety management and workers' safety behavior from three perspectives of safety management in companies: safety leadership, safety management practices, and safety culture. The first essay examines the effects of safety leadership and trust in leader on workers' safety behavior. We studied whether leaders' safety leadership and trust in leader affect workers' safety behavior through improvement of workers' involvement and safety knowledge by targeting the manufacturing industry, which has the second highest number of industrial accidents after the construction industry, and confirmed that safety leadership and trust in leader have a positive effect on workers' safety behavior. The second essay examines the impact of safety management practices on workers' safety behavior and finds that safety management practices such as safety training, workers' involvement, safety rules and procedures, and safety leadership have a positive impact on workers' safety behavior by improving workers' safety knowledge and safety motivation. The third essay examines the impact of safety culture on workers' safety behavior and finds that an organizational safety culture consisting of reporting culture, just culture, flexible culture, and learning culture enhances safety climate and safety motivation, leading to workers' safety behavior. The coefficient of determination (R2) of the three research models for the dependent variable, safety behavior, was 0.582 for the safety management practices model, 0.517 for the safety leadership model, and 0.506 for the safety culture model. Therefore, the safety management practices model has the highest coefficient of determination. The contributions of this study are as follows. First, until now safety research has been focused on the construction, aviation, military, and school sectors, but this study contributed to the revitalization of safety research in the manufacturing industry, which has the second highest number of industrial accidents after construction, by focusing on manufacturing workers. Second, for corporate safety managers, it confirms the importance of managing worker involvement, safety knowledge, safety climate, and safety motivation as mediators in driving workers' safety behavior. Third, the empirical study confirmed the correlation between the variables that can be used as a reference for the operation of a company's safety and health management system. 【Keywords】Safety Leadership, Trust in Leader, Workers’ Involvement, Safety Knowledge, Safety Management Practices, Safety Culture, Safety Climate, Safety Motivation, Safety Behavior