Although the workplace safety literature has primarily focused on internal factors of a firm that may influence organizational safety outcomes, recent studies have pointed to the need for a better understanding of how broader cultural and external environmental forces can affect workplace safety. Our study extends this research by examining whether a firm's relentless pursuit of efficiency aimed at customer satisfaction and order fulfillment—which we refer to as a customer-oriented efficiency logic (COE logic)—adversely affects workplace safety in the fulfillment center industries. We argue that the COE logic serves as a rationalizing mechanism that allows managers, employees, and even customers to accept, or even be complicit in, high numbers of workplace injuries and illnesses in these industries. We hypothesize that firms with a stronger COE logic have higher numbers of worker injuries and illnesses than do their counterparts with a weaker COE logic. We also further investigate whether the political ideology of firms' CEOs, and of the regions where their fulfillment centers are located, moderates the effect of the COE logic on worker injuries and illnesses. Based on the literature on political ideology and individual beliefs, we argue that the COE logic has a stronger effect on those guided by a liberal ideology as the "siren song" of a COE logic has more of an opportunity to affect liberals as compared to conservatives, given that the latter already tend to rationalize incidents of injuries and illnesses among the workers. Our hypotheses are widely supported by analyses using establishment-level (i.e., fulfillment center) data on nonfatal occupational injuries from 2016 to 2020, obtained from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) database. Our theorization and findings also pave the way for understanding the normalization of injuries and illnesses.
