Reduction of Unsafe Driving Behaviors at Work - A Field Study

Reduction of Unsafe Driving Behaviors – A Field Study In the field of occupational safety and health, worker behavior has often been associated with the cause of workplace accidents and injuries. For this reason, understanding worker behavior is a major area of concern for organizations striving to reduce occupational accidents and injuries in the workplace. Recent efforts to improve workplace safety have included programs based on applied behavioral research. These efforts are referred to as behaviour-based safety (BBS) programs. Over the last couple of decades, BBS approach to safety has been widely used and helped many organizations to improve their accident records. Its applications have been demonstrated successfully in different industrial and business settings including manufacturing plants, laboratories, general offices, hospitals and government departments. However, most of these successful references have taken place in industrialized and developed countries. Questions however, remain concerning the impact of these behavioural intervention techniques on other developing countries such as China, where work related accidents remain a major societal problem with significant economic and humanitarian implications. The need for systematic research to examine whether the BBS approach can improve the safety performance of organizations operating in China is evident. The overarching objective of the present research is to examine the effects on safe driving behaviors from the application of the BBS approach in China. The research included a 2year long 2 phased field study conducted in three companies at three different cities in China, one in Panyu, one in Guangzhou and the other one in Shanghai, between May 2008 to April 2010. The subject of the field study is company vehicle drivers.