The Antecedents and Consequences of Product Safety Management

This paper examines how firm-internal product safety processes are affected by external pressures and internal top management commitment and how such safety management processes determine product safety after market introduction. We build and test a theoretical model among eight variables: coercive pressure, management commitment to safety, product complexity, risk level of product categories, resource availability, prevailing safety climate, safety management processes (SMP), and product safety performance. Using data from 284 manufacturing firms, we found that the effects of coercive pressure on the deployment of SMP are transmitted via management commitment to safety, and that product complexity negatively moderates the effect of coercive pressure on management commitment to safety. In addition, our findings suggest that management commitment to safety is positively related to resource availability and to prevailing safety climate. Our analyses also reveal that both resource availability and prevailing safety climate have direct effects on the deployment of SMP, and their effects on product safety performance are fully mediated by SMP. Finally, the deployment of SMP was found to be positively associated with product safety performance. We discuss the implications of these findings for the field of product safety.