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The purpose of this multilevel study was to test whether regulatory focus mechanisms (promotion focus and prevention focus; Higgins, 1997, American Psychologist, 52, 1280-1300; Higgins, 2000, American Psychologist, 55, 1217-1230) can help explain how group safety climate and individual differences in Conscientiousness relate to individual productivity and safety performance. Results, based on a sample of 254 employees from 50 work groups, showed that safety climate and conscientiousness predicted promotion and prevention regulatory focus, which in turn mediated the relationships of safety climate and Conscientiousness with supervisor ratings of productivity and safety performance. Implications for theory and research on climate, motivation, and performance and avenues for future research are discussed.
Occupational productivity and safety have long been topics of great interest to organizational researchers and practitioners (Austin & Villanova, 1992). One question of particular importance is how organizations might strike an optimal balance between safety and productivity, to allow for high levels of overall individual, group, and organizational effectiveness (Hofmann & Tetrick, 2003). Unfortunately, very limited work to date has examined productivity and safety aspects of performance in the same study and setting. As such, it is still unclear whether there are potential tradeoffs between promoting safety and productivity, or whether factors enhancing one performance outcome improve or debilitate the other (cf. Beersma, Hollenbeck, Humphrey, Moon, Conlon, & Ilgen, 2003).
Another gap in the organizational literature on performance in general, and productivity and safety in particular, is the lack of multilevel studies that take into account both personal (e.g., personality, motivation) and situational (e.g., climate, leadership) predictors of performance outcomes (e.g., Dekker, 2002; Hofmann & Tetrick, 2003; Smith, Karsh, Carayon, & Conway, 2003). Organizational scholars have relied on either individual differences or situational variables when studying these outcomes (e.g., Hofmann & Stetzer, 1996; Probst, 2002, Wallace & Vodanovich, 2003), and thus we do not yet fully understand the unique or combined influences of person and situational variables. In line with this multilevel interactionist (person and situation) view, researchers have proposed that self-regulatory mechanisms could help explain how both individual difference and contextual factors influence work performance (e.g., Mitchell, 1997; Zohar, 2000), yet these propositions remain to be tested empirically.
Accordingly, following a multilevel interactionist view of work behavior, the main purpose of this research was...