A meta-analysis of personality and workplace safety: Addressing unanswered questions.

What is it about?

The purpose of this study was to quantitatively summarize (i.e., meta-analyze) existing findings regarding the relationships between personality traits and worker safety-related behaviors. Our results showed that although agreeableness and conscientiousness are related to increases in safe work behaviors, extraversion and neuroticism are related to decreases in safe work behaviors. Of these traits, agreeableness shared the strongest relationship with safety-related behavior, followed by conscientiousness. Although we confirmed that perceptions regarding safety's workplace priority (safety climate perceptions) are strongly associated with safety-related behaviors, the examined personality traits still offered unique explanations for these behaviors beyond what is explained by safety climate perceptions.

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Why is it important?

Although more recent safety research has tended to emphasize the importance of contextual factors and their impact on workplace safety, this study confirms the longstanding, but sometimes overlooked, view that individual differences (i.e., personality traits) do still matter when it comes to safety (though admittedly to a lesser degree than some contextual factors). Interestingly, we found that prosocial personality traits (e.g., agreeableness, altruism) tended to have some of the strongest relationships with safety-related behaviors, likely due to the fact that safety is achieved by people who are willing to work together for the common good.