How Work Intensification Relates to Organization-Level Safety Performance: The Mediating Roles of Safety Climate, Safety Motivation, and Safety Knowledge

Recent changes in the world of work have led to increased job demands with subsequent effects on occupational safety. Although work intensification has been linked to detrimental safety behavior and more accidents, there is so far no sufficient explanation for this relationship. This paper investigates the mediating roles of safety climate, safety motivation, and safety knowledge in the relationships of work intensification with components of safety performance at an organizational level. Safety engineers and managers from 122 Austrian high-accident companies participated in a cross-sectional survey. In line with our hypotheses, work intensification negatively related to both components of safety performance: safety compliance and safety participation. The results of a serial multiple mediation analysis further revealed safety climate and safety motivation to be serial mediators of the relationship between work intensification and safety performance. Unexpectedly, safety knowledge and safety climate only serially mediated the relationship between work intensification and safety compliance, but not the relationship between work intensification and safety participation. This study provides evidence for the detrimental effect of work intensification on safety performance across organizations. Additionally, this study offers an explanation as to how work intensification affects safety performance, enabling practitioners to protect their occupational safety procedures and policies from work intensification.© 2018 Bunner, Prem and Korunk

Procrastination in Daily Working Life: A Diary Study on Within-Person Processes That Link Work Characteristics to Workplace Procrastination

Procrastination is a form of self-regulation failure characterized by the irrational delay of tasks despite potentially negative consequences. Previous research on procrastination was mainly conducted in academic settings, oftentimes combined with a focus on individual differences. As a consequence, scholarly knowledge about how situational factors affect procrastination in work settings is still scarce. Drawing on job stress literature, we assumed that work characteristics go along with cognitive appraisals of the work situation as a challenge and/or hindrance, that these cognitive appraisals affect employees' self-regulation effort to overcome inner resistances, and that self-regulation effort should in turn be related to workplace procrastination. In our study, we focused on three specific work characteristics that we expected to trigger both challenge and hindrance appraisal simultaneously: time pressure, problem solving, and planning and decision-making. We hypothesized serial indirect effects of these work characteristics on workplace procrastination via cognitive appraisal and self-regulation processes that unfold within individuals over short periods of time. Consequently, we conducted a diary study with three measurement occasions per workday over a period of 12 days. Overall, 762 day-level datasets from 110 employees were included in Bayesian multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM; controlled for sleep quality and occupational self-efficacy). Our results revealed negative serial indirect effects of all three work characteristics on workplace procrastination via increased challenge appraisal and subsequently reduced self-regulation effort. Further, our results showed a positive serial indirect effect of time pressure (but not of problem solving or planning and decision making) on workplace procrastination via increased hindrance appraisal and subsequently increased self-regulation effort. Overall, our study showed that work characteristics are linked to workplace procrastination via within-person processes of cognitive appraisal and self-regulation. Because not all work characteristics triggered hindrance appraisal, we argue that it may make sense to further differentiate challenge stressors in the future. Moreover, cognitive appraisals affected self-regulation effort only on the within-person level. On the between-person level self-regulation effort was strongly negatively related with occupational self-efficacy. Thus, we conclude that depending the perspective on procrastination (e.g., differential psychology perspective vs. situational perspective) different variables will be considered relevant to explain the emergence of procrastination.© 2018 Prem, Scheel, Weigelt, Hoffmann and Korunk