Human Resource Management Practices and Workplace Safety: Evidence From Ethnographies on Autonomy-Based Structural Empowerment and its Limits
通过分析106个民族志案例，发现自主性结构赋权是唯一与低工伤率相关的人力资源实践，但在不确定性、物理危害等条件下其保护作用会减弱。
This mixed-method study examines how human resource management (HRM) practices relate to organizational work injury rates and when their safety benefits are constrained by features of the work system. Using quantitative data from 106 ethnographies spanning 1940–1999 in Hodson’s (2004) Workplace Ethnography Project, we simultaneously modeled five general HRM practices: systematic selection, training, information sharing, compensation, and autonomy-based structural empowerment. Autonomy-based structural empowerment emerged as the only practice associated with lower injury rates when modeled alongside the others. To examine theoretically informative deviations from this dominant pattern, we conducted qualitative re-immersion into four counterfactual cases in which very high empowerment co-occurred with frequent injuries. This analysis suggests four recurring boundary conditions—uncertainty, physical hazard exposure, interpersonal strain, and task complexity—that appear to weaken empowerment’s protective association by likely increasing volatility, cognitive load, and coordination demands. Together, these findings advance a contingency-based account of HRM effectiveness by specifying when empowerment functions as safety-enhancing and when clustered boundary conditions limit its effectiveness.