| In 2002, 3.7 million Americans suffered disabling injuries while on the job (National Safety Council, 2002). Workplace injuries often result in loss of income, decreased family involvement, increased strain, and costs for employees not covered by workers' compensation. In addition to the negative effects of workplace injury and illness on employees and their families, there are negative effects for employers, including lost productivity and increased costs associated with employee recruitment and replacement. Despite work-family conflict being recognized as a source of stress for employees, no research to date has considered how it negatively affects workplace safety. In this study, I hypothesized that high levels of conflict between work and family may negatively affect health care workers' safety performance primarily through detrimental effects on safety motivation.; A total of 243 health care workers from two independent hospitals in the Northwest region of the United States participated in this study. Through the use of paper-pencil and web-based surveys, respondents anonymously answered questions about their work and family situation, their safety motivations at work, and their participation and compliance with safety practices at work. Multiple regression analyses were used to test nine specific hypotheses. As expected, normative pressures for job performance had negative effects on work-family conflict via the increased perceptions of feeling overloaded at work. The results also demonstrated how increased family-to-work conflict is associated with decreased compliance with safety rules and less willingness to participate in discretionary safety meetings, primarily through decreased safety motivation. This negative relationship, however, was stronger when employees perceived their work-family culture as being supportive.; These findings underscore the importance of work redesign strategies that consider and address factors such as work performance norms and perceptions of work-family culture in an organization. These factors directly and indirectly affect health care workers' experiences of work-family conflict, and thus their personal safety at work. By establishing healthy performance norms and making sure the organizational culture supports workers' abilities to effectively manage family responsibilities, organizations can expect a return on their investment in terms of a safer workplace. |
