Are There Accident-Prone Work Environments? Teresa Ribeiro, Laboratoire de Psychologie Environnemtale CNRS UPRES-A 8069, Université René Descartes-ParisV, 28 rue Serpente, 75270 Paris Cedex 06, France, telephone +33 1 40 51 99 28, fax +33 1 40 51 99 19, e-mail teresa.ribeiro@psycho.univ-paris5.fr
This paper considers work accidents under an ecological perspective. Work-accidents are seen as events embedded in a large environmental system, as a product of the transaction between people and their physical, social and organisational environment. Our purpose is to identify the factors accounting for accidents, and how they are mutually related. We hypothesised that work accidents are a consequence of a mismatch between people, their actions, and their work environment.
We compared two burr workshops in the foundry industry with similar equipment and technology having significantly different accident rates over a same period of one year. Data collected concern the transactions between people and the physical features of their work environment, their social and organisational environment, their use of safety protections as well as their perceptions and evaluations of these features.
Results show that the different work accident rates seem to be due to a conjunction of physical, social and perceptional factors. The higher accident rate is linked to lower satisfaction and evaluation concerning the environment and the safety of the work place, higher cohesiveness between colleagues, and frequent changes in machine allocation which impedes work place appropriation. At the opposite, low accident rates goes along with higher satisfaction concerning the work environment and work organisation, positive evaluation and high satisfaction concerning the amount of work space allocated and the lighting conditions, and work organisation is characterised by a specific allocation of a machine and with higher variety of the pieces to work with. Thus accident rates depend no only on the physical and social features, but also on perception and evaluation processes concerning various aspects of the work environment. Such an approach of work accident contributes to enhance accident prevention and safety in an integrated way.
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