Safe behaviour at work is a managerial challenge. Traditionally, research into occupational health and safety has focused on safety culture and safety climate to explain risk-taking and safety behaviours. Managers in high-hazard industries have therefore concentrated on creating positive safety cultures and climates. Recently, I proposed that a “psychological contract for health and safety” may offer an alternative explanation for individual risk-taking and safety behaviours at work.

 

The psychological contract is used to explain general areas of the employment relationship and has been investigated by examining the fulfilment of promises or obligations from both employees’ and employers’ perspectives. I saw an employee’s psychological contract for health and safety as perceptions and expectations about the employers’ health and safety obligations and promises, and the extent to which these were perceived to have been fulfilled.

 

It should be noted that by their very nature psychological contracts are idiosyncratic and that different occupational groups (if not different individuals in the same group) may have their own perceived obligations about health and safety. Therefore, organisational and occupational contexts need to be considered carefully.

 

The context for my ongoing study is the healthcare sector. Employees from high-hazard services in the same NHS organisation were asked to take part. The purpose was to develop a psychological contract measure for health and safety. It aimed to discover whether employees with a positive psychological contract would trust line managers more with respect to health and safety, would perceive a better safety climate (ie. would have more positive perceptions about what their line managers say and do about health and safety), and be less likely to have experienced a near-miss or incident at work than employees with a negative psychological contract.

 

The results showed participants had high expectations of what their employer had promised with respect to health and safety, most notably training about the risks in their jobs, personal protective equipment and an incident reporting system. Participants were happiest about incident reporting. On average, though, they perceived a slight breach in their psychological contracts (ie, perceived obligations or promises were seen to be slightly unfulfilled), especially with regard to investigating accidents.

 

The main finding was that there were significant positive relationships between the psychological contract, trust and safety climate measures. This suggests that line managers play a key role. To ensure that employees develop appropriate expectations, line managers should be involved in the development of organisational health and safety policies and procedures so they will be better able to live up to their expectations. Similarly, line managers should play a role in the health and safety induction of new staff.

• Previous research into health and safety behaviours has focused on the notion of “safety cultures”.

• A psychological contract for health and safety may offer an alternative explanation for risk-taking and safety behaviours.

• Psychological contracts vary between individuals and should be re-assessed for different occupational groups.

• A study of healthcare workers suggests that line managers play a key role in employees’ psychological contracts for health and safety.