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Article Excerpt
Although it is acknowledged that human factors are involved in 80-90% of work accidents (Hale & Glendon, 1987), in recent years, the focus of research attention has been on organizational and environmental factors, rather than individual-level variables. The emergence of the concept of safety culture, defined as 'the product of individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies, and patterns of behaviour' that determine the organization's safety performance (Health & Safety Commission, 1993, p. 23), has led to researchers paying scant attention to human factor issues that fall beyond its scope, including personality traits. Research in this area has failed to reflect the growing interest surrounding the role of personality in organizational behaviour that has been observed more generally (Robertson, 1993).
There is a body of empirical work exploring the links between personality traits and accident involvement (see Hansen, 1988; Keehn, 1961; Lawton & Parker, 1998, for reviews). However, reviews of the existing literature have highlighted the empirical evidence as being contradictory and confusing. One of the difficulties with personality studies previously conducted is that they have lacked a coherent taxonomy, resulting in a wide variety of personality traits being measured, utilizing a mixture of different types of methodology. One means of clarifying the existing literature would be to re-categorize these data by applying a clear theoretical framework to describe personality traits. The emergence of the Big Five personality model (McCrae & Costa, 1990) has been widely accepted as a valid and reasonably generalizable taxonomy for personality structure (Digman, 1990; Goldberg, 1993), and has been used by numerous researchers as a framework to explore the criterion-related validity of personality in relation to job performance (e.g. Barrick & Mount, 1991; Salgado, 1997; Tett, Jackson, & Rothstein, 1991). Re-categorization of the personality traits measured by empirical studies into the Big Five of extraversion (or surgency), agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability (or low neuroticism), and openness to experience (or intellect/imagination), would allow an overview of the relationship between fundamental dimensions of personality and accident involvement. The use of meta-analysis would allow the estimation of an effect size of each aspect of personality in relation to accidents. Such an approach would also facilitate comparisons with the outcomes of previous meta-analyses using other performance criteria.
The current study will include both occupational and non-occupational accidents, examining the context of accidents as a possible moderator. Evidence from road traffic studies suggests that violations and accidents on the roads are strongly related to risk-taking behaviour (Jonah, 1997; Iversen & Rundmo, 2002); however, occupational accidents are often characterized by a lack of conscious risk taking (Wagenaar, 1992). International data on fatal accidents suggests that extraversion and neuroticism are related to road, but not occupational, accidents (Lajunen, 2001). This may suggest that different dimensions of the Big Five are associated with accidents in different contexts.
Extraversion
Several empirical studies have supported a positive relationship between extraversion and accident involvement; for example, Powell, Hale, Martin, and Simon (1971) found that the number of accidents experienced by mill workers was significantly higher for extraverts. Much of the support for extraversion as a predictor of accident involvement has derived from traffic accidents, where extraverts are significantly more accident-involved (Arthur & Graziano, 1996; Fine, 1963; Smith & Kirkham, 1981); although a few studies have found the opposite effect (Pestonjee & Singh, 1980; Roy & Choudhary, 1985).
The mechanism by which extraverts have higher accident liability is unclear. One explanation is that because extraverts have a lower level of vigilance, they will be less involved in tasks and, therefore, more liable to be involved in accidents (Eysenck, 1962). The finding that extraverts seek changes in self-stimulation to a far greater extent than introverts and, therefore, demonstrate significantly poorer performance on vigilance tasks, has been largely validated (Koelega, 1992). In particular, there is significant evidence to support a decrement in performance under monotonous conditions, such as motorway driving, and that extraversion may act as a mediator in the relationship between fatigue and driving errors (Verwey & Zaidel, 2000). In addition to the role of vigilance, another mechanism relating extraversion to accident involvement concerns the lower level facet of excitement-seeking. High sensation seekers have a greater tendency to take risks when driving, due to their increased need for novelty and thrills, and therefore have greater accident liability (Jonah, 1997). Furthermore, Thiffault and Bergeron (2003) found that high sensation-seeking extraverts may be more sensitive to road monotony and thus more prone to fatigue-related driving errors. In a work-related context, Lubner (1992) found that US pilots involved in aviation accidents scored significantly higher on thrill and adventure-seeking.
However, other facets of extraversion, such as experiencing positive emotions, have been found to reduce the likelihood of accident involvement. Iverson and Erwin (1997) found that positive affectivity (PA) had a significant negative correlation with work accidents. They suggest that the more socially adjusted aspects of extraversion, as reflected in PA, will mitigate against accident involvement, as high PA is associated with greater self-efficacy (George & Brief, 1992; Judge, 1993), which in turn is reflected in a higher degree of task engagement. They also suggest that high PA individuals will have more accurate and systematic decision-making skills (requesting information, recognizing situational contingencies, and using data; Staw & Barsade, 1993), which is reflected in more thoughtful and careful appraisal of situations, reducing their accident risk.
The literature presents a complex picture, with evidence for both positive and negative relationships between extraversion and accidents. Much of the evidence from transport psychology supports a positive relationship between extraversion and accident involvement; however, evidence derived from occupational research is more ambiguous. Lajunen (2001) suggests that extraversion is associated with fatal accidents on the road, but not in occupational accidents. Therefore, it is suggested that the effect of extraversion on accident involvement will be significantly moderated by context (occupational, non-occupational).
Hypothesis 1. The relationship between extraversion and accidents is significantly moderated by context (HI).
Neuroticism
Meta-analyses have suggested that emotional stability is associated with higher job proficiency across occupational groupings (Salgado, 2002). Conversely, one would expect that neuroticism would be associated with lower job performance. According to Eysenck (1970), individuals high in neuroticism (characterized by anxiety, hostility, depression, self-consciousness and impulsiveness) will be more accident-involved. Hansen (1989) suggests that the increased accident liability of neurotics is due to their distractibility; they tend to be preoccupied with their own anxieties and worries, and therefore more easily distracted from the task at hand. There is also evidence that neurotics are less likely to seek active control of the environment (Judge, 1993). A number of studies support a positive relationship between neuroticism and accidents for professional drivers (Pestonjee & Singh, 1980; Roy & Choudhary, 1985), motorists (Mayer & Treat, 1977; Seizer, Rogers, & Kern, 1968), and within industrial settings (Hansen, 1989).
Further explanation of the mechanisms linking neuroticism to accidents may be related to neurotics' response to stress. Neuroticism is the strongest single predictor of driver stress (Matthews, Dorn, & Glendon, 1991), suggesting that neurotics may respond more negatively to the presence of environmental stressors. Acute reactions to stressors, including anxiety and fatigue, have the effect of decreasing cognitive and performance capacities, such as reaction times and judgment, increasing the probability of errors (Steffy, Jones, Murphy, & Kunz, 1986). In addition to greater stress reactivity, neurotics tend to prefer less direct coping strategies, such as emotion-focused coping (Parkes, 1990), which are less effective in reducing stress (Iverson & Erwin, 1997). In a work-related context, offshore oil workers who were high in neuroticism reported significantly more work accidents, greater dissatisfaction, lower mental health and were more likely to be heavy drinkers when onshore (Sutherland & Cooper, 1991). Whilst this may reflect neurotics' tendency to experience greater stress symptoms, an alternative explanation is that neurotics have a negative world view, which leads them to negative perceptions of events, rather than actual experiences. This could be tested as a moderator variable in the current analysis, by comparing archival with self-report accident data, revealing whether neurotics actually have, or just report, more accidents.
Thus, support for a positive relationship between neuroticism and accident involvement is suggested, possibly due to neurotics' greater distractibility and increased vulnerability to the adverse effects of environmental stressors. This evidence derives from both occupational and non-occupational studies, indicating that moderation would not be expected.
Hypothesis 2. There is a positive correlation between neuroticism and accidents (H2).
Conscientiousness
In general, previous meta-analyses (Barrick & Mount, 1991; Salgado, 1997, 1998; Tett et al., 1991) report a tendency for conscientiousness to correlate well across criterion measures of job performance. There is also evidence to suggest a role for conscientiousness in terms of safety performance, with empirical studies supporting significant negative correlations between conscientiousness and accidents (Arthur & Graziano, 1996; Cellar, Nelson, York, & Bauer,...
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