How to Leverage Digital Platforms in Preventing Industrial Accidents: Evidence from a Multi-Level Empirical Study

The embeddedness of digital platforms in firms to improve industrial accident prevention performance remains a challenge for safety management. A pressing question exists regarding appropriate pathways to improve firm accident prevention performance by leveraging digital platforms. Prior research focuses on individual and organizational factors to prevent industrial accidents while ignoring information technology (IT) from a holistic perspective. Following a socio-technical lens, this study fills the research gap by proposing a new conceptualization of technical and institutional components and examining their combined effects in shaping individual and organizational accident prevention outcomes (i.e., employee accident prevention competence and firm accident prevention performance). Specifically, we introduce and conceptualize the concept of digital platform affordance to represent the technical component and theorize the external institutional force ( government pressure ) and the internal human agency ( top management support ) as the institutional components of digital platforms. By integrating the socio-technical lens, IT affordance theory, and institutional theory, we develop a theoretical model to examine the interaction effects between digital platform affordance, government pressure, and top management support on accident prevention performance. We conduct a multilevel modeling approach to test the proposed research model using a fine-grained matched-pair survey from multiple respondents (i.e., employees and safety executives) in 161 industrial firms in China. We find that digital platform affordance enhances firm accident prevention performance by improving employee accident prevention competence. The results also indicate that the magnitude of the moderating effect of government pressure is contingent upon top management support. This study conceptualizes and assesses the role of digital platforms in safety management and indicates that the amalgamation of their technical/institutional components is a promising means to prevent industrial accidents. We also provide a new perspective for Operations Management scholars to reinterpret the socio-technical lens in the emerging digitally enabled safety management subdiscipline.