Why Pushing Your Employees Too Hard Can be Dangerous? Performance Pressure and Workplace Safety

Abstract

Employers are eager to enhance employees’ performance and place a strong emphasis on high performance. Employees thus are facing performance pressure at work, which has important effects on job performance and unethical behaviors. However, less is known regarding how performance pressure might influence workplace safety. Can employees still maintain their own safety behaviors when they are struggling with high-performance demands? Drawing upon the Job Demands-Resources model, we develop and examine an integrative model that identifies why and when employees’ safety behaviors can be impacted by performance pressure. Specifically, we investigated a health-impairment process through which performance pressure damaged safety behaviors (i.e., safety compliance and safety participation). Moreover, we examined whether employees’ job self-efficacy, an important personal resource, buffered this health-impairment process. Using a two-wave lagged design to collect data from 279 frontline workers in a Chinese manufacturing company and a three-wave lagged design to collect multisource data from 220 frontline workers in another Chinese manufacturing company, we obtained support for our hypothesized model. The results indicate that performance pressure increased emotional exhaustion, which in turn led to fewer safety compliance and safety participation. However, this indirect effect was only significant among employees with low job self-efficacy. Given that employers have ethical responsibilities to protect their employees from risks in the workplace, our findings suggest that decision makers should take cautions when they are setting performance benchmarks for employees. Interventions to protect employees’ psychological well-being and trainings on job skills to promote employees’ job self-efficacy are also needed.