Rewarding safety performance: Improving safety or maintaining beliefs?

•Lower-level employees do not understand the exact link between safety performance and the annual cash bonus.•The link does not steer employees’ behaviour to align with safety goals.•The link leads to the under-reporting of incidents and their reclassification to less serious categories.•Other types of manipulations were also suggested, such as “chasing metrics that are easy to measure”, “running for numbers” or “gaming” them.•However, the link does signal the importance of safety alongside profit and production. The enduring link between the annual cash bonus and safety metrics that is common practice across the oil and gas industry, and in some other domains, is in part due to job market pressures, and possibly supported by a self-reinforcing belief system. The current study aims to investigate the contemporary annual cash bonus practice in the oil and gas industry from the perspective of the employees and managers, regarding both the perceived value of bonus payments and the influence these have on safety. Forty-eight employees participated in semi-structured interviews in which they described their sense of the impact of the bonus scheme on safety and what could be improved. The results of the case study indicate that only a minority of the frontline properly appear to understand the link between safety performance and their annual bonus payment. Even for those with an understanding, positive safety behaviours are not directly encouraged by the bonus since the incentives are linked to the absence of incidents and are not relevant to the workers’ daily activities. There is strong evidence for a negative impact on incident reporting, both through under-reporting and reclassification of incidents. However, the current practice is considered valuable by the respondents as it signals the importance of safety alongside production and profit. Taken together, the results suggest that the contemporary annual cash bonus practice should be discontinued in the long term because of the limited influence on safety behaviour and potential adverse effect on safety outcomes, simultaneously ensuring that the commitment to safety is communicated through alternative means.