CH 12 BSAD 310 Fall 2019

Chapter 12
Safety, Health,
Well-Being,
and Security
Copyright ©2020 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.

LEARNING OUTCOMES
2
Copyright © 2020 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly
accessible website, in whole or in part. HR5 | CH12
1. Identify and discuss the central elements
associated with employee safety and health
2. Describe the basic issues involved in the
physical work environment
3. Discuss stress and stress-management
programs in organizations
4. Identify and describe the most important
HR-related security issues in organizations

3
Employee Safety and Health
• Safety hazards: Conditions in the work
environment that have the potential to
cause harm to an employee
• Health hazards: Characteristics of the work
environment that more slowly and
systematically result in damage to an
employee’s health
LO 1

4
Common Workplace Hazards and Threats
• Factors that can cause accidents in the
workplace
• Characteristics of the physical environment
• Defective equipment and tools
• Poor lighting and poor or improper ventilation
• Improper dress and poor housekeeping
• Personal actions of individual employees
• Chemicals, toxic fumes, and secondary smoke
- May produce negative health effects that
appear more gradually
LO 1

5
Categories of Occupational Illnesses
• Occupational skin diseases or disorders
• Dust diseases of the lungs
• Respiratory conditions due to toxic agents
• Poisoning
• Disorders resulting from physical agents
• Disorders associated with repeated trauma
• Other categories of occupational illness
LO 1

6
Occupational Safety and Health Act (O S H A)
• Authorized the U.S. government to create
various standards regarding occupational
safety and health
• Responsibility for enforcing standards lies with
the Department of Labor
- Inspectors visit places of employment
randomly or by invitation from an employer,
an employee, or a union
LO 1

7
Occupational Safety and Health Act (O S H A)
(Continued)
• Requires that employers:
• Maintain highly specific and standardized
records of illnesses and injuries that occur
• Immediately report accidents and illnesses that
result in death at the workplace or that pose
serious health hazards to all employees in the
organization
• Critics question effectiveness of the act
• Act is too comprehensive, technical, and
arbitrary
• Enforcement is relatively uneven
LO 1

8
Controlling Accidents at Work
• Designing more safety into the workplace
through a process called safety engineering
• Safety engineers are experts who:
- Study the workplace
- Try to identify and isolate particularly
dangerous situations and recommend
solutions for dealing with those situations
LO 1

9
Controlling Accidents at Work (Continued 1)
• Providing protective clothing and safety
devices to employees
• Providing training on:
• Safest work procedures that the organization
can identify
• Following safe work procedures
• Reporting unsafe conditions to managers
• Providing safety incentives and behavior
modification training to employees
LO 1

10
Controlling Accidents at Work (Continued 2)
• Organizations can try to make the
workplace safer by:
• Emphasizing a reduction in the number of
accidents or in the number of workdays lost to
accidents
• Focusing on safe behaviors
• Safety climate
• Perception of the importance and priority an
organization gives to safety
• Should influence employee behavior
LO 1

11
Controlling Occupational Diseases
• Effects of occupational diseases are
observable only after extended periods of
time
• Companies should:
• Reduce or eliminate hazardous conditions
• Take precautions even if hazards cannot be
eliminated
- By informing all employees of the exact
nature of various job risks and hazards
LO 1

12
The Physical Environment
• Hours of work
• Compressed schedules cause fatigue and
hamper productivity
• Employees may find it difficult to adjust to a new
circadian rhythm when they do shift work
• Illumination, temperature, and office and
work space design influence productivity,
attitudes, and behavior at work
LO 2

13
Stress and Stress Management at Work
• Stress: A person’s adaptive response to a
stimulus that places excessive psychological
or physical demands on him or her
• General sets of organizational stressors
• Task demands
- Stressors associated with the specific job a
person performs
- Examples: Occupation, security, and overload
• Physical demands
- Stressors related to the job setting
- Examples: Temperature and office design
LO 3

14
Stress and Stress Management at Work
(Continued)
• Role demands
- Stress may result from either role ambiguity
or role conflict that people experience in
groups
• Interpersonal demands
- Stress may result from group pressure,
leadership style, and conflicting personalities
and behaviors
LO 3

15
Differences in How One Experiences Stress
• Type A personality: Highly competitive and
highly focused on work with few interests
outside of work
• Experiences more stress than Type B
personalities
• Type B personality: Tends to be less
aggressive, more patient, and more
easygoing
• Hardiness: Individual difference that allows
some individuals to experience less stress
when dealing with stressful events
LO 3

16
Differences in How One Experiences Stress
(Continued)
• Individuals high in self-esteem are less
susceptible to the problems associated with
stress
• Gender determines how one experiences
stress
• Differences may reflect true differences in the
stressors that men and women are exposed to
at work
LO 3

17
Consequences of Stress at Work
• Individual consequences
• Behavioral, psychological, and medical
• Organizational consequences
• Decline in performance and change in attitudes
• Burnout: Feeling of exhaustion
• Develops when an individual simultaneously
experiences too much pressure and too few
sources of satisfaction
• Has implications for both employees and
organizations
LO 3

18
Consequences of Stress at Work (Continued)
• Dysfunctional behavior: Any behavior at
work that is counterproductive
• Turnover: People leaving their jobs, whether
voluntarily or involuntarily
• Feigned absenteeism
• Theft and sabotage
• Sexual and racial harassment
• Workplace violence and aggression
LO 3

19
Wellness Programs in Organizations
• Institutional programs
• Undertaken through established organizational
mechanisms
• Collateral stress programs
• Created specifically to help employees deal with
stress
• Employee-fitness programs
• Encourage employees to exercise, which in turn
is presumed to reduce stress
• Promote everything from humor to
massage as antidotes for stress
LO 3

20
Other Interventions
• During the swine flu outbreak, O S H A
issued guidelines on how to avoid it and
treat it
• AIDS policy
• Organizations can adopt three strategies in
trying to deal with AIDS from a management
perspective:
- Categorize AIDS under a comprehensive life-
threatening illness policy
- Form an AIDS-specific policy
- Have no policy at all
LO 3

21
Workplace Security
• Need to live in a safe and secure
environment is a driver of human behavior
• Factors that add to an employee’s
insecurity:
• Announcements about actual or impending
layoffs
• Nature of insurance and retirement plans
• Threat of terrorist attacks
LO 4

KEY TERMS
22
• Safety hazards
• Health hazards
• O S H A
• Safety engineers
• Circadian rhythms
• Stress
• Type A personality
• Type B personality
• Hardiness
• Burnout
• Turnover
• Dysfunctional
behavior
• Institutional programs
• Collateral stress
programs

SUMMARY
23
• Many accidents do occur in the workplace,
and many workplaces are not healthy
• The physical environment in which an
employee works is important and can affect
safety, health, and well-being
• Organizational stressors and individual
consequences can affect productivity and
employee behavior
• Security can be threatened in many
different ways at work

CH 12 BSAD 310 Fall 2019

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (17)

Similar to CH 12 BSAD 310 Fall 2019

Similar to CH 12 BSAD 310 Fall 2019 (20)

More from Janice Robinson

More from Janice Robinson (19)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

CH 12 BSAD 310 Fall 2019