Citation

Strahan C, Watson BC, Lennonb A. Transp. Res. F Traffic Psychol. Behav. 2008; 11(6): 418-426.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.trf.2008.04.002

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Road crashes are a significant cause of work-related injury and death. Driver fatigue is thought to cause 20-30% of fatal crashes. The current study utilised a survey to examine the relationship between safety climate, occupational stress and work-related driver fatigue. Drivers (n=219) from two government organisations responded to items from the job-related tension scale [Kahn, R. L., Wolfe, D. M., Quinn, R. P., and Snoek, J. D. (1964). Organisational stress: Studies in role conflict and ambiguity. Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing], safety climate questionnaire [Glendon, A., and Litherland, D. (2001). Safety climate factors, group differences and safety behaviour in road construction. Safety Science, 39, 157-188] and purpose-designed items on fatigue-related behaviour. Outcome measures were current self-reported, fatigue-related behaviour and self-reported 'near (crash) misses' during the previous 6 months. Together, occupational stress and safety climate predicted fatigue-related behaviour, accounting for 29% of the variance over and above that explained by control variables. Further, logistic regression revealed occupational stress and safety climate to be significant predictors of fatigue-related near misses. Safety climate emerged as a stronger predictor of both fatigue-related behaviour and near misses than occupational stress. Results suggest that organisations can play a part in improving the safety-related behaviours of their workforce through attention to safety climate and occupational stress.