Abstract
Research shows that withholding safety concerns on encountering hazards – safety silence– is a critical contributor to accidents. Studies therefore aim to prevent accidental harm through interventions for reducing safety silence. Yet, the behaviour remains poorly understood, obstructing effective safety management: it is unclear to what extent safety silence involves muted safety voice (the partial withholding of safety concerns), and how muted safety voice can be recognised in speech, may be measured based on the degrees and types of safety voice (speaking up about safety), progresses over time, and may be optimally reduced. To improve safety management, this study proposes a conceptual model for the manifestation of safety silence and muted safety voice using a laboratory experiment (N = 404) to evaluate the implications for the effectiveness of three interventions (salient hazards, clear responsibilities, encouragements) across stages of a hazard. Results indicated that safety silence and muted safety voice are measurable in terms of the degree to which concerned people engage in five types of safety voice at different points in time, and we revealed this is important for safety management: interventions only unmute safety voice at unique hazard stages and for knowledge-based speech when people are concerned. This indicates that safety silence and muted safety voice are situated and can be recognised in nuanced speech, with interventions being most effective when timed appropriately and people have safety concerns to speak up about.
Highlights
Safety silence is the act of withholding safety concerns about acci dental harm (Schwappach and Richard, 2018; Tucker et al, 2008)
By using an experimental paradigm and analysing speech, the current study aims to improve safety man agement by i) measuring how safety voice manifests in speech for people engaging in safety silence, muted safety voice and explicit safety voice, and ii) enabling specific interventions to reduce safety silence
The current study investigates the degree to which individuals engage in safety voice, muted safety voice, and safety silence, and the implications of this for interventions, using a previously validated experimental scenario
Summary
Safety silence is the act of withholding safety concerns about acci dental harm (Schwappach and Richard, 2018; Tucker et al, 2008). Safety voice theory suggests that interventions can reduce the like lihood of safety silence (Noort et al, 2019a), for instance, by improving hazard salience (Tucker et al, 2008), people’s felt responsibility (e.g., Duan et al, 2017) and leaders’ inclusiveness (e.g., Barzallo Salazar et al, 2014; Burris, 2012). While measures have been devel oped to capture distinct types of safety voice (e.g., Krenz et al, 2019), the degree to which interventions reduce safety silence as a continuous (i.e., the degree and timing of speech) and categorical phenomenon (i.e., content of speech) is unclear
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