Authors: Connie Deng, Helena Nguyen, Anya Johnson

This study focuses on how work design shapes distinct types of safety motivation at work. While most safety research targets high-risk settings like construction where safety is salient, this study examines unsupervised care settings where safety is less visible and relies more on individual motivation to be safe. Specifically, this study draws from a sample of disability support workers that provide one-on-one care in client homes or community settings, which are isolated environments that lack supervision and coworker presence, limiting hazard identification and social reinforcement of safe behaviour. In such settings, how work is structured and organised may critically shape why people are motivated to behave safely. The study examines two forms of safety motivation: pro-social and external motivation. Pro-social motivation – doing something for the benefit of others – may be a crucial predictor of safety behaviour within service industries like healthcare and social assistance industry that involve high contact with clients or patients.
Drawing from the self-determination theory, this study proposes that designing high quality work can satisfy employees’ basic psychological needs of relatedness, competence, and mastery, which help to foster more internalised forms of safety motivation and improved employee safety performance. Therefore, the goal is to explore how aspects of work design (e.g., agency, mastery, relational) can foster distinct types of safety motivation, and in turn, how each type of safety motivation can influence safety behaviours. Additionally, the study also examines job demands (e.g., role conflict, time pressure) as an important contextual moderator of these relationships. This study draws on data collected at two time points from disability support workers at an Australian disability service provider. Preliminary evidence, using time 2 data, show that pro-social safety motivation was positively associated with task significance, a relational component of work design (r = .27, p = .006). External safety motivation was positively associated with task identity, a mastery component of work design (r = .198, p = .046). Pro-social safety motivation was also positively associated with deep safety compliance (r = .273, p = .005) but not significantly associated with surface safety compliance, while external safety motivation was positively associated with surface safety compliance (r = .214, p = .03) and not significantly associated with deep safety compliance. This study will test a moderated mediation model using the matched dataset, discuss limitations and how to address these limitations.