Why pushing your employees too hard can be dangerous? Negative implications of performance pressure for workplace safety behaviors

Purpose Although research has highlighted the detrimental effects of performance pressure on employee behaviors, the existing literature has predominantly focused on self-serving motives to explore how employees behave regardless of others under performance pressure. Drawing upon the Job Demands-Resources model, this research adopts a resource-based perspective to investigate how performance pressure, as a job demand, may impair safety behaviors through the health-impairment process. Further, we examined whether job self-efficacy, as a personal resource, can mitigate these adverse effects of performance pressure. Design/methodology/approach Two-wave time-lagged data from 279 employees and three-wave time-lagged multisource data from another 220 employees were collected in two field studies, respectively. Findings Results revealed that employees become exhausted under performance pressure, and thus engaged in fewer safety compliance and safety participation behaviors. However, employees' job self-efficacy was found to buffer the negative indirect effects of performance pressure on these two types of safety behaviors. Originality/value By examining the consequences of performance pressure from a resource-based perspective, this research provides a new perspective to understand the dark side of performance pressure. When facing performance pressure, employees may even disregard their own interests and take safety shortcuts due to the exhaustion of resources.