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Description
Though work place injuries and fatalities have decreased in the last decade, the Department of Labor reported that in 2012, there were a total of 3 million injuries in the private sector, and 792,700 injuries in the public sector. Although organizations can mitigate injuries and fatalities by performing human interventions, studies have shown that positive outcomes of such interventions may be affected by employees' attitudes. The current study introduces safety cynicism as a unique construct that may help researchers and practitioners further understand different types of safety attitudes employees may hold. Two studies were conducted with the goal of developing safety cynicism and providing evidence that it is a unique concept in the workplace safety literature. The goal of Study 1 was to define safety cynicism, generate items to assess the construct, and identify the factor structure of the construct. For this study, a sample of 147 participants was recruited from Facebook or Amazon's Mechanical Turk. The results of Study 1 suggest that the safety cynicism consists of two subscales: 1) insincerity and 2) incompetence. Next, a sample of 254 electrician trainees gathered from a union electrician training center was used to confirm the factor structure identified in Study 1 and provide initial evidence of validity. Results of Study 2 did not confirm a two-factor model, but instead suggested that safety cynicism consists of four subscales: 1) supervisor insincerity, 2) supervisor incompetence, 3) organization insincerity, and 4) organization incompetence. A 12-item measure was developed to measure safety cynicism, and initial evidence of incremental validity over common safety predictors and trait cynicism when predicting safety outcomes was provided. Practical implications, future research, and limitations are discussed.
