Capturing the Impact of Organizational Safety Management on Safety Outcome With a Mediating Role of Safety Commitment: A Conceptual Model

Introduction

Safety management is a major challenge for researchers and academicians to provide the best solution for workplace accidents and injuries (Kirwan, 1998). Workers play a significant role in achieving organizational goals, contributing to competitive advantage development, and improving organizational performance (Alloni et al., 2016). However, safety management practices help to safeguard employees from work-related hazards (Valipour Khatir, 2018). Similarly, the investigation of major industrial accidents, e.g., Bhopal, Piper Alpha, and Chernobyl, traced the events back to inadequate safety management (Khoo Teng Hong, 2011b). Ensuring organizational occupational health and safety performance has become the central dilemma for researchers and theorists about how to reduce injuries and accidents alike (Naji, Isha, Al-Mekhlafi, Sharafaddin, & Ajmal). According to the International Labor Organization (ILO, 2018), workers around the globe suffer millions of injuries, accidents, and near misses. Therefore, a plethora of research has been conducted to improve the health and safety performance and to reduce the safety management cost (Grill, Pousette, Nielsen, Grytnes, & Torner, 2017).

Even though workplace safety is vigorously pursued by the developed economies, some of them, including the USA and Germany, still suffer losses every year in millions of injuries (David A Hofmann & Morgeson, 1999). Therefore, in developed countries, occupational health and safety regulations are still rigorous and obligatory, in order to reduce the rate of injuries and accidents (Almost et al., 2019; Khoo Teng Hong, 2011a). The literature on organizational safety shows that scholars have carried out research studies to mitigate occupational health and safety issues from different perspectives (Ajmal et al., 2020b). In these studies, most scholars discussed the importance of employees’ safety training, safety compliance, and improvement in safety rules and procedures to improve safety outcomes (Ajmal et al., 2020b; Al-Mekhlafi et al., 2020). According to Dahl et al. (2016), safety determinants, including safety training and safety communication, play an essential role in remaining safe.