*2.4. Safety Consciousness and Safety Performance*

The employees' knowledge about safety standards encourages them to ensure safety performance. Worker engagement in safety may systematically act to reduce the probability of human errors from occurring by making workers more involved with and aware of their tasks/surroundings and associated risks, as well as the error traps that could be present. Thus, increased levels of worker engagement in safety activities could possibly be related to increased safety performance as measured by standard safety outcomes, i.e., accident rates [38].

Knowledge about safety standards and practices leads to enhanced levels of cognitive engagement [62]. The employees display focus, attention, and concentration on the safety aspects of the job. By displaying safety behavior, the employees working in the organization are known to be safety-minded people. Safety mindedness leads to leading others by example. They are the ones who are fond of continuous learning. They respond to feedback quickly and have strong communication skills. Safety-conscious people try not to harm others and make people learn safety practices by adopting safety organizational citizenship behaviors [63]. A positive safety climate is developed when the employees have a perception of management safety values and commitment to safety [48].

Safety consciousness refers to an "individual's own awareness of safety issues" [11]. This awareness works on both a cognitive and a behavioral level. Cognitively, safety consciousness means being mentally aware of safety in your work and knowing what

behaviors foster operational safety. Behaviorally, safety consciousness enacts the behaviors that foster operational safety. Safety consciousness can be separated from the safety climate in a manner that safety consciousness is about the safety of oneself, whereas a safety climate is about the safety of the whole workplace in the organization. We argue that the extent to which the individuals are aware of the safety hazards and are aware of possibly avoiding them indicates whether they are in a better position to minimize the accidents, i.e., the safety performance. Safety performance is the extent to which companies are able to prevent accidents and errors.

Kelloway et al. [64] argued that if anything could reduce the chances of accidents, it would be employees' awareness of issues that threaten safety, their knowledge of how to prevent them, and their behaviors oriented toward preventing them (i.e., safety consciousness). Safety consciousness comes from the segments of the organization working together. Individuals, when seeing one another following the safety principles, tend to adopt safe work practices, which thus resembles the social systems theory. In light of the above arguments, the hypothesis developed is:
