رویدادهای ایمنی محل کار و عملکرد شرکت Workplace safety events and firm performance

Introduction Due to strict government regulations, consumer awareness, and market forces, business firms in the current environment cannot be strictly motivated by profit, they must be concerned with the natural environment and the society as well (Marshall et al., 2015). That is, firms today need to actively manage a triple bottom line (Elkington, 1998), as opposed to only economic profit. Astute management of social equity and human capital necessitates that a firm ensure a safe and healthy working environment for its employees. In this manner, a firm can fulfill its obligation to society in general and its employees in particular. Operations managers are increasingly concerned with workplace safety since it can have a significant impact on cost, delivery, and quality (Brown et al., 2000). Beyond its impact on employee morale and internal operations, a negative workplace safety incident may also cause significant damage to a firm’s reputation. Government agencies and financial markets have the potential to punish a company for a failure to provide safe working conditions. In addition, customer expectations regarding workplace safety have recently become an important issue in the context of social responsibility. It is therefore imperative that firms ensure workplace safety as part of their overall operational improvement program. Doing so, the firm can develop in a sustainable way – increasing profit while boosting workforce motivation and morale. To ensure a safe and healthy work environment, the US Congress created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in 1970. OSHA has the authority to create workplace safety standards and to penalize employers for safety incidents, noncompliance, or situations where inspectors find the workplace unsafe or hazardous for employees. Despite a limited enforcement budget and historically minimal penalties, compliance with OSHA regulations is typically high (Weil, 1996). To address situations where compliance is lacking, a handful of studies investigated firm performance subsequent to OSHA-levied sanctions (e.g. Davidson et al., 1994; Fry and Lee, 1989; Viscusi, 1979). However, these studies use data that predate significant increases in the value of OSHA-levied fines in 1990; furthermore, they focus on the market’s reaction to the OSHA-levied fine rather than the initial announcement of a negative workplace safety event. This is an important gap in the literature since OSHA’s power to regulate, inspect, and penalize firms was significantly increased again in 2016 (Berzon, 2015; Hilton, 2016; Paranac, 2016). This paper explores the impact of negative workplace safety announcements on firm performance with particular emphasis on the evolving view such incidents have on stock performance. We will analyze the issue from the perspective of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and explore ways supply chain managers can contribute to improve firm performance through the development of safe working environments. We begin with a review of the workplace safety literature. We then describe the methodology followed to collect and analyze the data. Results from our analysis are then presented and discussed. We conclude with a discussion of the results in the context of social responsibility and sustainable operations.