Owning Workplace Safety: Investigating Safety Locus of Control Among Nurses

Workplace accidents and injuries continue to be a challenge in high-risk industries such as healthcare, where safety is a daily critical concern. Although organizational factors such as safety climate have been well-established as predictors of safety-related outcomes, less is known about the role of individual differences in workplace safety. This research investigates safety locus of control, which captures an employee’s tendency to believe that their safety-oriented behaviors actually play a role in preventing safety incidents. Individuals with a highly internal safety locus of control tend to recognize the importance of their own and others’ safety actions for promoting workplace safety and preventing safety-related incidents from occurring in their workplace, whereas employees with low internal safety locus of control tend to believe that adverse safety outcomes have less to do with employee behavior and are more the result of luck or chance (i.e., have a more external orientation). Across three studies (with a total of 792 participants), we developed a measure for assessing safety locus of control (Study 1), evaluated its construct validity (Study 2), and measured its incremental validity on workplace safety beyond other important constructs like safety climate (Study 3). Results suggest that safety locus of control helps to explain critical workplace safety outcomes (such as safety performance) beyond environmental factors such as safety climate alone and plays an influential role on well-established safety processes within the workplace. This research highlights the importance of considering individual differences alongside environmental factors in workplace safety models.