Trust, Safety, and Employee Decision-Making: A Review of Research and Discussion of Future Directions

Managing workplace safety in the technology work environment has traditionally focused on factors such as physical design, machinery operations and other hardware counter-measures. Cognitive-based human factors have not seen a strong emphasis by safety and technology researchers. This is beginning to change as investigators have begun to examine how the management of human factors could impact safety in the workplace. One of these factors is trust. A second factor, safety climate, measures the perception employees have of the relative importance of safety within an organization. Although limited research has examined the association between trust and safety climate, little empirical data has been collected on the relationship between the two concepts as they relate to the decision-making process of employees. Trust has been shown to have a positive effect on workplace safety climate, which in turn has been hypothesized to play a role in employee decision-making. Yet, research measuring the relationship between trust, safety, and employee decision-making has been limited. This analysis will outline the concept of trust and its relationship to safety climate and safety-related decision making. Definitions of trust, past safety climate research, and relevant decision-making theories will be highlighted. The challenges of existing measures of trust, safety climate, and decision-making will be discussed. New directions for research in safety decision-making will conclude the paper. INTRODUCTION Several factors are hypothesized to influence employee perceptions of safety within an organization and the decisions they make as a result of their perceptions. One of these factors is trust, which has been shown to play a positive role in several workplace outcomes including employee cooperation, problem solving, and high quality communication (Dirks & Ferrin, 2002; Kramer, 2006). The concept of trust has been examined from researchers in a variety of disciplines. Researchers have debated the indicators, meaning, and conditions of the deceptively complex topic of trust. Exploration in disciplines such as psychology, business, management, leadership, and safety has also made important contributions to the understanding of trust in the workplace. The role of safety in the workplace has also been an important consideration for supervisors and managers. Professional leaders in the field of technology consider the subject of safety important enough to include it on the certification exam administered by the Association of Technology, Management, and Applied Engineering organization (Freeman et al., 2009). In addition, Miller, Heidari and Marsh (2004) found industrial safety to be the only content area which received 100 percent support from technology department chairs when they were surveyed on content areas to be included on the certification exam. Because of the influence trust has on safety climate in the workplace and the importance of safety climate to the field of technology, the topic of trust and safety climate warrants further investigation. In addition, the success of workplace safety programs is dependent on the decisions employees make on the job (Zohar & Erev, 2007). An increased understanding of factors influencing the employee decision-making processes is an important component of occupational safety and could potentially provide the basis for associated employee educational intervention. A LITERATURE REVIEW: DEFINING TRUST Most theoretical definitions of trust acknowledge two parts: 1) a willingness to be vulnerable to another party to perform expected and desirable actions even though the party cannot be managed or scrutinized and 2) the implication that this vulnerability leads to a certain degree of risk or dependency on the other party to act in a benevolent manner (Dirks & Ferrin, 2002; Kramer, 1999; Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995; Shockley-Zalabak, Ellis, & Wingrad, 2000; Slovic, 1993; Whitener, Brodt, Korsgaard, & Werner, 1998). The model of trust suggested by Mayer et al. (1995) includes two other important components: a trustor and trustee. The trustor is taking a risk that allows his or her fate to be determined by another party (Currall & Epstein, 2003) and is therefore, the more vulnerable of the two parties. The second party, the trustee, is the party who is to be trusted. Mayer et al. (1995) suggest that although the vulnerability is lower