THE BEHAVIOR OF 1ST-LINE SUPERVISORS IN ACCIDENT PREVENTION AND EFFECTIVENESS IN OCCUPATIONAL-SAFETY

This article analyses the relationship between supervisors' behaviour in accident prevention and effectiveness in occupational safety based on a sample of 100 manufacturing workplaces. Data was collected from a total of 2169 respondents including 1064 first-line supervisors. A typology of supervisors' behaviours in occupational safety is proposed and bivariate analyses tend to confirm the hypothesis that the participatory type of supervisors' involvement in accident prevention contribute to the effectiveness in occupational safety. However, multivariate analysis on a reduced sample (N = 68) shows that this relationship disappears in the presence of a variable measuring the development of the workplace safety program, which is acting as a better predictor since it is highly correlated with the participatory involvement of supervisors and to the workplace effectiveness in occupational safety. These results corroborate some of the results found in previous studies on the effectiveness of safety programs and support some aspects of current theory on effectiveness in occupational safety which emphasizes the importance of variables under management control, including supervisors' behaviours. However, multivariate analyses also show the importance of the workforce autonomous capacity to take initiatives in occupational safety as a major determining factor of workplace effectiveness and ability to reduce work accident rates. This latter result should be more fully analysed in further research in order to develop a more comprehensive theory of effectiveness in occupational safety.