The role of personal commitment to safety in shaping safety performance of front-line employees; a case study in small manufacturing industries.

Many organizational, social, and personal factors can affect safety performance of employees. Personal commitment to safety is another factor in this regard which have been paid less attentions in previous studies. The main objective of the present is to investigate the role of this factor in shaping safety performance of employees.   this cross-sectional study was conducted among 291 workers from several small manufacturing industries in several provinces located in the center of Iran, Iran. Data were collected using a self-administered questionnaire. In order to determine the role of personal commitment to safety, several hypotheses were defined. According to them, personal commitment to safety can mediate the effect of organizational factors on safety performance. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed for examining the hypotheses. The model demonstrated that personal commitment to safety has significant direct effect on safety performance. Management commitment to safety is the main factor affecting personal commitment to safety (p-value<0.01, path coefficient= 0.257). Supportive environment was another important factor in this regard (p-value<0.01, path coefficient= 0.175). In contrast, safety training had no significant effect on personal commitment to safety (p-value=0.328), demonstrating its poor designing. personal commitment to safety can be promoted by improving organization and social factors, such as management commitment to safety and supportive environment, which in turn would result in improvement of safety performance.