Direct and indirect associations of management support with compliance with laboratory safety policies: the mediating roles of perceived trust and self-efficacy.

BACKGROUND

Laboratory safety policies (LSP) are critical for ensuring the safety of research environments. Although studies have explored compliance with information security policies, user compliance behavior with laboratory safety policies remains under-explored.

METHODS

This study investigates the associations of Management Support (MS) with compliance with LSP, including direct and indirect pathways through Self-efficacy (SE) and Perceived Trust (PT), using data from 510 university biomedical laboratory users (93.72% of whom were undergraduates). Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was applied to analyse the direct and indirect associations.

RESULTS

MS showed a significant direct association with user compliance behavior (UCB) (β = 0.247, p = 0.003) and significant indirect associations via PT (indirect β = 0.332) and SE (indirect β = 0.198), supporting partial mediation.

CONCLUSION

The indirect association via PT was numerically larger than that via SE (indirect β = 0.332 vs. 0.198). However, a bootstrap test of the difference between the two indirect effects (5,000 sub-samples) yielded a 95% confidence interval of [-0.117, 0.465], which includes zero, indicating that the difference was not statistically significant. Nevertheless, both indirect pathways were significant, underscoring the importance of both institutional trust and self-efficacy in promoting laboratory safety compliance.