When an organization’s management creates a goal conflict between workplace safety and the profitability of the organization, workers perceive work-safety tension. This leads to reduced safety-related behavior, culminating in higher rates of occupational injuries. In this study, we explored design components of behavior-based safety programs: audit results and process communication, reward and punishment, and the framing of production goals as gains or losses. This allowed us to directly observe the effects of the goal conflicts and of the countermeasures that we designed in this study. We examined the perceived work-safety tension using a simulated water treatment plant in a laboratory study with 166 engineering students. Participants had the task of conducting a start-up procedure. The operators’ goal conflict was created by a choice between a safe and mandatory (less productive) procedure and an unsafe and forbidden (more productive) one. As participants were told that their payment for the study would depend on their performance, we expected that rule violations would occur. We found acceptance of measures and their design as important for rule related behavior. Work-safety tension emerged as a strong driver for violating safety rules. We conclude that safety incentive programs can become ineffective if goal conflicts create work-safety tension.

In a production context, safety-related rule violations are often associated with rule breaking and unsafe behavior even if violations are not necessarily malevolent. Nevertheless, our past experiments indicated a range of strategies between violation and rule compliance. Based on this finding, different types of rule-related behavior for managing organizations’ goal conflict between safety and productivity are assumed. To deepen the understanding of rule violations, the behavior of 152 participants in a business simulation was analyzed. Participants operated a plant as a production worker for 36 simulated weeks. In each week, they could choose to comply with safety rules or to violate them in order to maximize their salary. A cluster analysis of the 5,472 decisions made on how to operate the plant included the severity of the violations, the number of times participants changed their rule-related strategy, and the extent of failure/success of these strategies. Five clusters of rule-related behavior were extracted: the compliant but ineffective “executor” (15%), the production-optimizing and behavioral variable “optimizer” (13%), the successful and compliant “well behaved” (36%), the notoriously violating “inconvincible” (29%), and the “experimenter” (7%), who does not succeed with various violating strategies.

To ensure safety-related behavior in risky operations, several safety measures, such as safety-related rules and safety management systems including audits, rewards, and communication, are implemented. Looking at each single measure, it is reasonable to assume that each one leads to rule compliance, but how do they interact? In an experimental study, we varied (1) the salience of either safety, productivity, or both, (2) the reward for the compliance and punishment for a violation, (3) the communication of audit results (result- or process-based), and (4) the gain and loss framing of performance indicators. In a 3 × 2 × 2 × 2 factorial between-group design, 497 engineering students in the role of Control Room Operator participated in a five hour simulation of a production year of a chemical plant. Looking at single effects, salient safety goals led to a low number of rule violations compared to the salience of production goals. Interestingly, the interaction of several measures showed that particular combinations of measures were highly detrimental to safety, although altogether, they were assumed to reduce risks. For practice, this means that the effects of safety measures depend on their particular combination and can lead to unwanted effects.

As financial incentive schemes have the tendency to increase risky behavior, we analyzed their effect on rule-related behavior in a safety-critical task. We compared risky behavior (in terms of the amount of rule violations) between three payment condition: continuous, up-front, and bonus pay. Fifty-nine participants were trained as production personnel to conduct a start-up procedure of a simulated wastewater treatment plant, representing a high reliability organization. During the 5-h experimental study, risky behavior could have been applied 48 times while building a simulated production year. The results show that the conditions with an incentive scheme (up-front and bonus pay) led to significantly more rule violations than the condition with continuous payment without an incentive scheme. Our study highlights the general increased risk effect of incentive schemes and provides a starting point for industries to assess their implicit and explicit incentive schemes.