the impact of safety training programs on workers’ psychosocial orientation and behaviour

Safety training programs are one of the tools provided for by law in order to promote workers’ safe behaviours. However, to date few studies have been carried out in order to assess the effectiveness of these training programs. Our study, conducted on a sample of 345 workers of three companies in northern Italy, aimed to test the hypothesis that the impact of safety training on unsafe behaviours is mediated by workers’ psychosocial orientation with regards to safety, in particular by factors such those that the Theory of Planned Behaviour consider predictors of the behavioural intention (i.e., attitudes towards behaviour, subjective norms or perception of safety climate, and perceived behavioural control). Our results showed that those workers who had attended a training program reported behaving unsafely less frequently than those who had not. This was not due to a better knowledge of the norms, but was mediated by positive attitudes towards safe behaviour and the perception of a safety climate. In addition, we found that liking of the training program played a motivational role in enhancing the effects of training on safe behaviour.