Making Sense of Industrial Accidents: The Role of Job Satisfaction (Report‪)‬

INTRODUCTION Attribution theory basically suggests that people generally make causal attributions for their own and other peoples' behaviour to facilitate understanding and to shape future behaviour. They do this by assessing the co-variation between the cause and effect variables (1),(2). The importance of causal attributions in both the social psychology and accident literature is well documented. In the social psychology literature, the attribution model is considered as one of the most appropriate analytical tools for exploratory and descriptive studies (3),(4) and has been employed extensively in work environment studies (5-9). For example, workplace attributional analyses have been used to predict behaviour in hazardous work environments (10) and have served as explanatory frameworks for management's decisions to reprimand and or terminate employees (11-13). Besides, they have provided models for the analysis of behaviour in the face of danger (14), and for ergonomic perceptions of workplace accidents (15). Attributional analyses have provided a useful framework for the clarification and exposition of the causes of industrial accidents and has been regarded as the backbone of safety management policies (10),(16).