One of the key focuses of the safety practitioners is to help reduce workplace accidents and injuries. The most common approach involves providing training, possibly more site inspections so as to more effectively deal with hazards as well as ensuring workers perform their tasks in a safe manner. To motivate worker compliance the organization may implement some form of reward or discipline process. This approach may garner some short-term improvement, but they really do not address the underlying causes.

Innovative Thinking

In studying worker behavior as they go about performing their tasks, one may realize that the worker’s attitude was manifested in how they performed their work. Some seemed not to pay close attention to what they were doing, some don’t follow directions given, some don’t follow good safe work practices, others don’t utilize the training they received, some violated safety rules like, didn’t always use PPE, didn’t watch out for hazards, became complacent, cut corners, rushed, etc. That aligns with a general understanding of attitude.

This highlights the fact that typically all traditional safety interventions focus on the three E’s: Education (training); Engineering (hazard management); Enforcement (inspections). These are compliance driven and extrinsic in nature. A more effective approach to the creation of an injury free work environment may be through the use of intrinsic drivers through the use of the planned behavior theory that can positively influence safety attitude and behavior.

Attitude Overview

A person collects information about the world around them. How they are affected by this creates their beliefs (cognitive learning) which may be true or untrue. Beliefs in turn shape our attitudes. Attitudes allow for the classification, evaluation and summarization of the vast amounts of information people receive and process on a daily basis making things more predictable and manageable for them. Attitudes are responsible for how we react to conditions, appraise and judge people; respond to situations, ideas, or people. Similarity of attitudes with others increase likability and acceptance.

Attitude basically has three components: emotional, cognitive, and behavioral. Each component is very different, builds upon one another, and affects how we relate to the world. The emotional and cognitive components can only be inferred, while the behavioral component is the only one that is observable. Attitudes can also be explicit or implicit. Explicit attitudes are the ones that we are consciously aware of and they clearly influence our behaviors and beliefs. Implicit attitudes are unconscious, but they do have an effect on our beliefs and behaviors. Because of their nature they are somewhat more difficult to change.

• The emotional component represents the person’s disposition towards something. Involving a person’s feelings towards or about another person, place, issue, or thing.
• The cognitive component consists of the knowledge, information, and beliefs a person has about something. Involving beliefs, preferences and other aspects that shape how a person responds to or interprets the world around them.
• The behavioral component consists of a person’s proclivities to function or behave in a certain way towards others or situations.  

Attitudes can be positive, negative or neutral, and/or possibly conflicted. Research has found if a person is exposed to a certain person, place or thing over a long period of time, the nature of their attitude may change. Observations determine the responses we learn, but reinforcement determines the responses we express. Positive consequences that follow behavior or attitudes reinforces them, while negative reinforcement tends to extinguish them.   

Behavioral Intention

Safe behavior is affected at the worksite dependent on a series of steps. The worker becomes aware of the stimulus; they process it, which triggers an emotional response which shapes the workers behavior in performing their task.         

We engage in a thought process before doing something in response to a stimulus. The thinking results in a decision which forms our intention. This is based on two factors, personal and social. The personal factor reflects our attitude towards performing that behavior and how important it is to us. The social factor reflects the importance of what others would expect or want us to do and how important that is to us. Usually this is subjective as we make assumptions about what others may think or how they would expect us to respond or act.

Which of these two factors plays a greater role in influencing our behavioral intention is subject to a number or factors. Attitude toward behavior plays a more important role when the decision maker has a greater amount of information and the subjective norm becomes more important when there is little information. Another factor to consider is the personality of the decision maker. The position of a person within the organizational structure is also a factor. Higher positions are less likely to be influenced by subjective norms than by attitudes toward behavior.

Changing Attitude (Behavior)

To structurally change one’s behavior, we have to change our intention to perform that behavior.

So, to change our intention to perform that behavior we must either change our attitude or change our subjective norm regarding that behavior. Or possibly even both of them may need to be changed. And to accomplish that we have to change the underlying belief(s) regarding that behavior. This highlights the complexity of the endeavor as well as the challenges faced. Unlike personality attitudes can be changed. Many theories exist as to why we may change our attitudes.

Unlike personality attitudes can be changed. Many theories exist as to why we may change our attitudes. One way is through our experience. If we become aware of information from a reliable and trusted source and that new information is in conflict with our understanding or position, this creates conflict and forces us to try to achieve congruity (see the principle of consistency). This ultimately will cause us to change our attitude about the subject. Another way to change a person’s attitudes is to change its utility to that person. If an attitude is perceived as having no benefit at best or creating problems at worst, the person will change it.  

Persuasion is another way to change attitude. If the person can be convinced that an attitude is detrimental to them, they will in all likelihood change it. Another way to change attitude is though persuasion. If the person can be persuaded that an attitude is detrimental to them, they will change it. There are certain factors that come into play in order to foster this.

• Research indicates that intelligent people are not likely to be persuaded by “one sided” argument.
• The credibility of a perceived message has been found to be a key variable here; if one trusts and respects the source, they are more likely to accept and act on it.
• The nature of the message plays a role in persuasion. Sometimes presenting both sides of a story is useful to help change attitudes. Sometimes the number of arguments presented in a persuasive message will influence attitude change.

We have to be careful about the message. Overly strong messages are likely to produce the opposite effect than the one that was intended. People will not believe us and therefore not change their attitude. You have to remember to not only know the attitudes of your audience, but their latitudes of acceptance and rejection.  If your message falls outside those boundaries you are apt to get the “boomerang effect” on your message.  In those cases, going for a moderate change may be prudent.

In persuasion as in social influence and attitude change, emotion is a common affective factor. Emotions work in conjunction with cognitive processes. This is how we think about situations, consider information, or evaluate issues. Any discrete emotion can be used in a persuasive appeal. It is important to note that there is an optimal emotion level in motivating attitude change. To little emotion may not facilitate change and too much may paralyze the person and prevent attitude change.

Important consequences of fear and other emotional appeals include the possibility of reactance. This may lead to either message rejections, source rejection and/or the absence of attitude change. As the EPPM suggests, if there is not enough motivation, an attitude will not change; if the emotional appeal is overdone, the motivation can be lost.

Emotions perceived as negative or containing threat are often studied more than perceived positive emotions like humor. Though the inner workings of humor are not agreed upon, humor appeals may work by creating incongruities in the mind. Recent research has looked at the impact of humor on the processing of political messages. While evidence is inconclusive, there appears to be potential for targeted attitude change is receivers with low political message involvement.

Conclusion

Organizations generally have an expectation that the workforce will perform the work in a safe manner. They have policies, and procedures that speak to this in some form. But because many of them treat safety as distinct and separate from operations they create unforeseen system driven risks and barriers to optimal performance. Because, in this case, neither management, operation’s staff or safety personnel have an understanding of the scope of the undertaking, the extent of the knowledge and sophistication required to understand and evaluate the problem and an appreciation for the magnitude of the underlying challenges, they invariably work on the symptoms and get the results they have designed their systems to give them.