Mining for injury-related organizational stressors

This study was exploratory in nature and its purpose was to determine the utility of using a company accident database to identify potential organizational stressors for prevention purposes. Two distinctive areas of research, Organizational Stress (OS) and Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) are of relevance in the current study, both of which have moved in emphasis from individual to organizational factors. The methodology for identifying organizational stressors involved a three-stage process. The first stage identified the stressors that are common to the OHS and OS area of research for the subset of stressors that lead to injuries. The second stage was to place these common factors into an established model of injury causation from the OHS literature, thereby generating a classification scheme. The third stage involved fitting the resultant classification scheme to the company database. The database was comprised of 509 injury reports from an international hardrock mining company spanning a four-year period from 1996–1999. Evidence of organizational stress was discovered in the coding scheme for the database. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...