Seo Hyun Jung, a Ph.D. candidate in the Management major at the Graduate School of Business Administration (advisor: Professor Kim Na Jung), received an award for an outstanding paper by the next generation of scholars at the “2025 Korea Safety Culture Academic Conference” held on December 23.

This award was granted following deliberation by the Editorial Committee of the Korea Safety Culture Society(KSCS). The KSCS is a public interest corporation where researchers, experts, and practitioners in the safety field participate. It is an authoritative academic organization that has led academic research and policy/practical discussions with the goal of spreading safety culture and building a safe society.

Seo Hyun Jeong's paper analyzed the impact of environmental, ergonomic, and interpersonal stressors on safety behaviors among service industry workers and verified the moderating effects of psychological safety climate and managerial safety competency. Using panel data from the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency (KOSHA) 10th Industrial Safety and Health Survey, the analysis of 2,551 respondents revealed that environmental and ergonomic stressors inhibited safety behaviors. Conversely, psychological safety climate and managerial safety competence acted as facilitating factors. Notably, when both organizational resources were high, the negative impact of ergonomic stressors was mitigated.

This paper is a result of research conducted by student Seo Hyun Jeong, supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea, as part of the project “Development and Validation of a Safety Leadership Scale: Focusing on a Dynamic Competency Model.” It holds significance for its empirical analysis of the concept of manager safety competency.

This award signifies that research from the Management major in our university's Department of Business Administration is making substantial contributions to academic discourse in the field of safety culture.