Three essays on the relationship between preventive training, accidents and firm performance
Occupational accidents are one of the most severe problems for workers’ health worldwide, especially in dangerous sectors such as the construction sector. In this context, we analyze some individual and organizational factors that companies can manage to reduce this high number of accidents and prot...
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| Formato: | tesis doctoral |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2022 |
| País: | España |
| Recursos: | Consejo General de la Arquitectura Técnica de España (CGATE) |
| Repositorio: | RIARTE |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:www.riarte.es:20.500.12251/3196 |
| Acesso em linha: | http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12251/3196 http://hdl.handle.net/11201/160028 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palavra-chave: | Accidentes Prevención de riesgos laborales Sector de la Construcción Formación y empleo Siniestralidad Productividad Rentabilidad Salud laboral Costes de construcción 6109.01 Prevención de Accidentes 6310.09 Calidad de Vida 5311.07 Investigación Operativa 5311.09 Organización de la Producción 5312.03 Construcción |
| Resumo: | Occupational accidents are one of the most severe problems for workers’ health worldwide, especially in dangerous sectors such as the construction sector. In this context, we analyze some individual and organizational factors that companies can manage to reduce this high number of accidents and protect their workers’ health. This study focuses on the construction sector, one of the sectors that most have to deal with accidents and their consequences. Firstly, we focus on workers’ safety training. We examine whether safety training reduces accidents in the construction sector. Using data from the training providers companies, the Spanish Labor Authority, and Informa & Bureau van Dijk (SABI), we analyzed this relationship from 1283 construction companies’ data over 11 years (2007—2017). Our results show that more hours of safety training are associated with more accidents. The results also show that just the continuous compulsory training provided by qualified entities led to a reduction in accidents, thus indicating a practical implication to reviewing the actual safety training. These occupational accidents directly affect the human resources of a company and its productivity. Despite this, there is still a scarce safety culture within the companies in this sector and insufficient knowledge of the effects these high accident rates have on the company results. Previous studies that focus on the relationship between the accident rate and the company’s profitability found mixed evidence. We hypothesize that accident rates impair the company’s profitability. And that the effect changes depending on accident rate levels, the company’s profitability increases for low levels of accidents, while it is reduced for high levels of accidents. Our results show that the accident rate does not reduce the company’s profitability. However, supporting the latest hypotheses, an inverted U-shape is confirmed, with the maximum profitability at a certain level of the accident rate. We conducted the analyses using pooled, random, and fixed-effect estimators. In addition, we have conducted the U-test and the Fieller test to confirm the shape it has. Furthermore, we have used dynamic panel data estimation to control for endogeneity, derived from the possibility that the current values of some of the independent variables are a function of past company performance. Following the analysis of the factors that a company can manage to reduce its accidents and protect its workers’ health, we focus on analyzing the safety climate. One of the main aims of this work is to propose a theoretical model to measure the direct and indirect effect of safety climate on workers' physical and mental health mediated by job satisfaction. Since the literature has not provided a widespread model that can reflect the safety climate for different industries and companies. We propose a multidimensional construct of safety climate, considering the most salient factors in the literature and including psychological capital as a new factor that affects the workers’ perception of safety climate. Job satisfaction includes working conditions, job rewards and compensations, and work-life balance. In this last part of the study, we used the last wave of the European Working Conditions Survey (2015), which has data from the construction sector in Spain. The proposed model was validated by using structural equation modeling. Our results highlighted that to improve mental health in construction workers, it is necessary to emphasize the importance of work-life balance, job rewards and compensations, and safety climate. As for physical health, it is crucial to control both safety climate and worklife balance. Eventually, we present some recommendations to construction companies' managers, letting them know the different items that have to be controlled to improve their results by establishing a ranking of all the variables that explain safety climate. |
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