The Formation of Safe Behavior in the Course of Work Activity

Occupational safety policy should be pursued with due regard for the specifics of production and the particular features of work at individual sites. It is therefore important to know the causes of emergency situations and to systematically carry out preventive measures to eliminate them.

Psychologists distinguish three functional parts in every human action: the motivational, the orientational, and the executive. A disruption in any of these parts entails a disruption of the activity as a whole. A person violates rules and instructions either because they do not want to follow them, or because they do not know how to do so, or because they are unable to do so.

Thus, in the psychological classification of the causes of emergency situations and cases of occupational injury, the following can be distinguished:

• 1. Disruption of the motivational part of an action. This manifests itself in an unwillingness to perform certain actions (operations). The disruption may be relatively permanent (the person underestimates the danger, is prone to risk-taking, has a negative attitude toward labor and/or technical regulations, safe work is not incentivized, and so on) or temporary (the person is in a state of depression or alcohol intoxication).
• 2. Disruption of the orientational part of an action. This manifests itself in ignorance of the rules for operating technical systems and of occupational safety norms and the methods for complying with them.
• 3. Disruption of the executive part of an action. This manifests itself in the failure to follow rules (instructions, prescriptions, norms, etc.) as a result of a mismatch between a person's mental and physical capacities and the demands of the production work. Such a mismatch may be:
  • • permanent — due to insufficient coordination, poor concentration of attention, and so on;
  • • temporary — due to overexertion, reduced working capacity, deteriorating health, stress, or alcohol intoxication.

Appropriate preventive measures can be recommended for each group of causes of hazardous situations and accidents.

At the level of the motivational part — this means promotion and education. A worker's motivation toward safe behavior, toward the need to observe safety rules so that work proceeds without injuries or accidents, can be raised through social and material incentives. Safe activity can also be shaped by means of negative stimulation, that is, through punishment in the form of monetary fines. On the whole, however, positive stimulation produces a greater effect in shaping safe behavior. Experimental psychology has shown that punishment by itself does not suppress striving and interest in an attractive object; on the contrary, punishment may help reinforce such strivings . Thus, for example, in experiments with animals it was observed that if they had previously obtained food by pressing a lever, then even when that lever was electrified so that pressing it was accompanied by electric shocks, the animals continued, despite the pain, to use the lever. It may be assumed that something similar is characteristic of a person for whom violating the rules brings a benefit. Despite the punishment, he will still violate the rules. Violations will cease only when they stop being a source of benefit.

Reducing disruptions of the orientational part of actions comes down to training and skill development. In teaching occupational safety, theoretical knowledge should be presented in a form that can be transformed as easily as possible for solving practical problems and that finds confirmation in concrete professional activity. The English scientist P. Powell proposed teaching safe activity on the basis of error analysis . He divided workers' errors into two general categories:

• • psychomotor errors, or errors of "physical experience";
• • decision-making errors, or errors of "cognitive experience".

Psychomotor errors arise at the level of motor operations and manifest themselves in clumsy motor acts. Experience shows that they arise not so much from insufficient development or breakdown of skills as from incomplete sensory synthesis. Therefore, for the safe performance of motor actions one should develop the ability to assess the situation at hand fully and correctly. Given the necessary psychomotor skills, such abilities will help prevent psychomotor errors and accidents of this category.

It is far more difficult to avoid errors, especially dangerous ones, in decision-making. P. Powell distinguishes two types of these:

• • errors made in tasks with a limited choice;
• • errors in open-ended tasks, where there are likewise a number of paths, but choosing any of them gives rise to new problems.

Powell's program for teaching safe work comes down to the fact that, besides psychomotor skills, great attention is devoted to developing the learner's thinking abilities. He proposes using B. Bloom's method, which establishes a certain hierarchy of levels of thinking for such tasks:

• • knowledge — the ability to recognize and identify a particular phenomenon;
• • comprehension — the ability to state and explain the given phenomenon;
• • application — the ability to apply and use one's knowledge and comprehension in particular situations;
• • analysis — the ability to break the given phenomenon down into its components;
• • synthesis — the ability to reconstruct the given phenomenon from its components;
• • evaluation — the ability to critically assess the given phenomenon.

In teaching, the learner must be led consistently from the level of knowledge to the level of comprehension and further — to the ability to critically evaluate the situation at hand.

Teaching safe work must be organically linked to teaching the profession. At the same time, the development of motor, sensorimotor, and other work skills should be oriented not only toward achieving high results economically, but also toward achieving them by a necessarily safe path. In addition, it is necessary to cultivate the traits of a safety-minded personality. The main condition for developing the integral characteristics of a personality is raising the level of self-awareness.

If there are clear indicators for assessing a worker's qualifications and condition, then by what criteria can a worker's behavior be assessed from the standpoint of safety?

Practice shows that a worker's behavior (action) can be characterized as safe if he:

• • performs the work (assignments, operations) in accordance with the technological regulations, complying with safety requirements;
• • acts confidently, in the established order, in hazardous situations (an accident, incident, emergency, etc.);
• • observes labor discipline and internal work rules both at the workplace and outside it.

The basis of human behavior is motivation.

Motivation — the impulses that give rise to the activity of an organism and determine its direction.

Motivation determines the direction and activity of a person's behavior as a whole. However, a specific act, a specific action, occurs under the influence of a phenomenon called a motive. Motivation is constantly renewed and changes in the course of learning, upbringing and self-education, and the accumulation of life experience. Accordingly, the motives behind specific actions and deeds also change. Needs and psychological attitudes play an important role in shaping motivation. A need is a state in which a person feels a want for something or someone. According to A. Maslow's concept, a person has five groups of needs:

• • physiological;
• • safety;
• • belonging (the striving to belong to a particular social group);
• • recognition (the striving to achieve mastery and competence, the need for prestige and high social status);
• • self-actualization (cognitive and aesthetic).

It is held that each of these needs (with the exception of the physiological ones) forms as the preceding one is satisfied.

An important component of motivation is the psychological attitude (mindset) toward fulfilling safety requirements, that is, a worker's safe activity is a consequence of a correct attitude toward occupational safety requirements and of his mindset toward working without accidents. A worker will believe in the possibility of safe work only to the extent that his immediate and senior supervisors believe in it. As a rule, managers underestimate the role of the factor they can influence broadly (creating a good psychological climate) and overestimate the significance of a factor over which their influence is limited (increasing earnings).

The policy of creating conditions for safe work must be aimed at a collective search by members of the workforce for ways to prevent accidents. Every worker, in his own position, is obliged to seek solutions to this problem and to put forward proposals in this direction, and such proposals should be actively encouraged. Any accident, regardless of its severity, must draw the attention of managers at every level. All of this contributes to the formation, within the enterprise, of a shared public opinion: here everyone bears responsibility for safety. Only in such a case will the worker gain confidence that everything around him is in order, and, as a result, a mindset toward safe work will emerge.

Cultivating safe behavior can be defined as a directed influence on a worker's psyche aimed at developing in him qualities that contribute to his safe work. The question of cultivating safe behavior is examined in the work of the American scientist L. Schlesinger, who distinguishes two methods of influence:

• • single-channel communication, in which a channel of influence exists but there is no feedback channel to monitor how that influence is perceived;
• • two-channel communication, in which it is possible to monitor how the influence is perceived during the process itself.

The means of the single-channel method of influence are printed materials (instructions, manuals, rules, etc.), safety posters, wall newspapers, reports, television, and film. The two-channel method of influence is realized through discussions, collective review with workers of accidents, and the use of protective equipment. Each of these methods should be chosen in accordance with the specific task to be solved, but two-channel communication is noticeably more effective.

An important aspect of educational work in occupational safety — the training of qualified specialists in this field and granting them the corresponding authority, which helps raise the standing of the occupational safety service. Warning about hazardous situations is regarded as one of the effective methods of psychologically orienting workers toward safe behavior.

The appearance of new equipment or new technology must in every case be an object of special attention on the part of the enterprise's safety service. Here, previously established safety rules may prove unsuitable or only partly suitable, and new production hazards that could not previously have been foreseen may come to light. Increased attention from management to such points of danger arising from their novelty will not go unnoticed by the workers and will help foster in them a better mindset toward safe work.