Accident Proneness in Industries: (External and Psychological Factors)

Article shared by Smriti Chand

Accident Proneness in Industries: (External and Psychological Factors)!

External Factors:

Many non-psychological factors have been noticed to influence the accident rate and, to some extent, determine an employee’s accident proneness. For example, as pointed out by Vernon, the accident rate increases during the latter part of the working day.

According to Vernon’s results, this tendency is so marked that during a twelve-hour working day women experienced two and one half times as many accidents as during a ten hour day. Although this increase has often been attributed to fatigue, the fact that the time of maximum accident rate as compared with hours worked is reversed on the night shift indicates that psychological rather than physiological factors are operating.

Although Vernon’s results attach a lot of importance to the length of the working day, it is frequently seen that as the working day is lengthened, the accident rate increases in greater proportion than the increase in number of hours worked.

Psychological Factors Related to Accident Proneness:

Basically, accidents are caused either due to the work situation or due to personal variables like accident proneness. Because of their psychological makeup, some people are more susceptible to accidents than others. Generally, the work situation determines the liability of accidents. Some work situations e.g. coal mining, quarry, marine transportation etc. are more hazardous than others.
If, there are consistent differences in accident frequency among the individuals in the same work situation and thereby same liability, then it can be assumed that there are one or more personal variables contributing to the consistent individual differences.
It is important to identify the personal variables that are associated with accident frequency on the job in question. As these vary from job to job, the variables operating in a particular situation can be identified only through systematic investigation.