Study of the influence of employee safety voice on workplace safety level of small- and medium-sized enterprises

Purpose To improve unsafe workplace of Chinese SMEs, this paper aims to use the multi-agent simulation experiment to reveal the relationship between employees' safety voice and safety level of enterprises. Design/methodology/approach Through simulation of employees' safety voice activities, enterprises' production activities, enterprises' safety activities, an experiment platform is built. The experiment introduces external variable of labor resource and sets four experimental situations considering whether labor resource is sufficient and whether employees' value is significant. Findings The result shows that not all the employees' safety voice can change small- and medium-sized enterprises' safety level. When there is sufficient labor supply, employee safety voice cannot improve the safety level of enterprises; when there is short of labor and employee safety voice is strong, safety level can be effectively improved. When employees have the strikingly different value variance, safety voice of common employees cannot improve safety level of enterprises, but employee safety voice with high value can improve safety level. Originality/value This fully provides that under the circumstances of disappearing demographic dividend in China, improving employees' safety awareness and reasonably using their safety voice can boost SMEs to enhance safety level.