Why risk helping? : an investigation into the relationship between safety and two motivators of new employees helping behaviour.

Objective. The primary objective of this study was to investigate, within the context of new employees’ and workplace safety, two motivators of employee’ helping related behaviours; job security and need for respect. Design. Correlational cross-sectional design. Setting/Participants. New Zealand; high risk work industries. 80 eligible participants were recruited from employees in various organisations and associations, with 22 participants excluded due to 10%, or greater, missing data. Main Outcome Measures. Organizational Citizenship Behaviours and Safety Risky Helping Behaviours. Results. The study’s objective, and subsequent hypotheses, were empirically tested using correlation analyses in SPSS. These analyses showed that employees tenure was not directly related to either the need for respect motivator (α = 0.05), or the job security motivator (α = 0.05). The analyses also indicate that both motivators were positively related to employees’ Organizational Citizenship Behaviours (p < 0.05 level, one-tailed), but not related – be that positively or negatively – to their Safety Risky Helping Behaviours (p < 0.05 level, one-tailed). Conclusions. The results of this study suggest that the two motivators examined are directly related to Organizational Citizenship Behaviours, but not to tenure or to Safety Risky Helping Behaviours. As this study is amongst the first to examine these motivators within this context, these findings suggest that further investigation into these motivators, and indeed to the overall model of employee-employee helping, is needed before further consideration is given to implications or practical applications