Beyond Accidents and Injuries: Work-Safety Tension and Physical Health of Manufacturing Employees

Details

• Personal Author:
  Barnes-Farrell J ; Chen Z ; Cherniack, Martin G. ; Warren N
• Description:
  Workplace safety is a primary concern for manufacturing organizations, where risks of accident and injury are significant (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2012). Beyond physical hazards, attention has increasingly been paid to psychosocial features of the work environment as contributors to worker safety compliance behavior and important safety outcomes such as workplace injuries and lost work days (cf, Hermann, Ibarra, & Hopkins, 2010; Huang et al., 2012). In particular, there is now widespread recognition of the role of work safety climate in contributing to such safety outcomes. There is also growing interest in poor work safety climate as a type of organizational stressor that has implications for other aspects of worker health and well-being, including both physical and psychological health (cf. Abbe, Harvey, Ikuma, & Aghazadeh, 2011; Arcury, O'Hara, Grzywacz, Isom, Chen, & Quandt, 2012). However, these relationships are not well-documented for physical health outcomes; furthermore, findings from safety studies that have included non-accident/injury physical health measures are generally limited by reliance on self-reports of physical health. Because physical health has implications for functioning in all facets of an employee's life, it is important to understand ramifications of safety climate that extend beyond the sphere of accidents and injuries. The present study aims to contribute to the safety literature on manufacturing workers by examining the association between one particular facet of psychological safety climate -- work safety tension -- and several important stress-linked physical health outcomes. Independent of its implications for safety behavior and direct safety outcomes, such as accidents and injuries, we argue that the facet of safety climate known as work-safety tension acts as a workplace stressor that increases the experience of occupational stress, which mediates indirect effects on other aspects of physical health. For this study, we focused on two aspects of physical health that represent known health issues in the manufacturing sector: cardiovascular issues (represented by clinical assessments of blood pressure and heart rate), and musculoskeletal disorders (represented by clinical assessments of cervical rotation flexibility and self-reported trunk and extremity pain). Work safety tension refers to workers' perceptions that working safely is at odds with effectively performing one's job duties and meeting organizational standards for performance (Morrow, McGonagle, Dove-Steinkamp, Walker, Marmet, & Barnes-Farrell, 2010). Thus, work safety tension implies high, but conflicting, job demands both on job performance and work safety. Furthermore, when multiple job demands are perceived as incompatible, workers' perceptions of control are weakened (Karasek, 1979). According to Karasek's (1979) demand-control theory, high job demands and low decisional control are joint causes of stress. In sum, we propose that work safety tension will increase perceived work stress; the resulting stress accumulates and impairs workers' physical health. We collected data from 720 manufacturing workers in New England during the first wave of an ongoing longitudinal study on aging, working conditions and musculoskeletal disorders. Workers were from six manufacturing organizations; they were aged from 20 to 71, and 70.6% of them were male. Work safety tension was measured with 4 items adapted from previous work (cf. Mueller, DaSilva, Townsend, & Tetrick, 1999). Work stress was assessed with 5 items from the Brief Stress in General Scale (Stanton, et al, 2001). Physical health measures included clinically assessed systolic and diastolic blood pressure, resting heart rate, cervical rotation flexibility; and self-reported physical pain (4 items; Punnett, 2007). Preliminary analysis showed that blood pressure and flexibility were significantly related to age, blood pressure and physical pain were significantly associated with gender, and physical pain was significantly correlated with accident/injury experience. Hence, we included age, gender, and whether employees had any accident or injury in the past 12 months as covariates corresponding to their related outcomes in the model that we tested. The hypothesized model, with gender, age, and accident/injury included, produced acceptable model fit (y2=484.122, df=183, CFI=.936, RMSEA=.043) in AMOS 18.0. After controlling for age, gender, and accident/injury, work safety tension remained predictive of workers' physical health, in regard to blood pressure, heart rate, flexibility, and pain. Stress mediated three of the four paths (all except the path from work safety tension to flexibility). Specifically, work safety tension was positively associated with stress, and the latter exhibited positive relationships with blood pressure, and heart rate, and pain. This is one of the first studies documenting links between work-safety tension and stress-related physical health outcomes (aspects of cardiovascular and musculoskeletal status) among manufacturing sector employees. Our data corroborate the negative impact work safety tension may impose upon employee health beyond its relationships with workplace accidents and injuries. Although the data on which these findings are based are cross-sectional, and thus cannot be used to provide strong causal inferences, the strength of the study is the availability of clinical assessments for most health variables. [Description provided by NIOSH]
• Subjects:
  Age Factors Manufacturing And Industrial Facilities Occupational Health Safety
• Keywords:
  Age Factors Cross Sectional Studies Health Effects Manufacturing Safety Climate Stress-related Injuries Worker Safety
• Publisher:
  American Psychological Association
• Document Type:
  Text
• Funding:
  Grant
• Genre:
  Abstract or Summary
• Place as Subject:
  Connecticut ; Massachusetts ; OSHA Region 1
• CIO:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)
• Topic:
  Workplace Safety & Health
• Location:
  North America
• Pages in Document:
  1-2
• NIOSHTIC Number:
  nn:20054949
• Citation:
  Work, Stress, and Health 2013: Protecting and Promoting Total Worker Health(TM), The 10th International Conference on Occupational Stress and Health, May 16-19, 2013, Los Angeles, California. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2013 May; :1-2
• Contact Point Address:
  Zhuo Chen, B. S., 406 Babbidge Road, Unit 1020, Storrs, CT, 06269-1020
• Federal Fiscal Year:
  2013
• NORA Priority Area:
  Manufacturing
• Performing Organization:
  University of Connecticut School of Medicine/Dentristy, Farmington
• Peer Reviewed:
  False
• Start Date:
  20080901
• Source Full Name:
  Work, Stress, and Health 2013: Protecting and Promoting Total Worker Health(TM), The 10th International Conference on Occupational Stress and Health, May 16-19, 2013, Los Angeles, California
• End Date:
  20200929
• Collection(s):
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:6943e2e3763add5d6c46bb22bb54d38d1757a4db0b32914766e1d11fc07d968870138358a92a56d8e3cfbc42696b62476c0d7c1970a2d04e20f20bf2a9394c03
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/217355/cdc_217355_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 178.62 KB ]