Faultlines and Miners’ Safety Behaviour: Role of Emotional Exhaustion and Safety Self-Efficacy

In high-risk industries such as coal mining, ensuring safety behaviour among workers is critical. Growing workforce diversity in mining enterprises has led to the emergence of team faultlines—hypothetical dividing lines that split teams into internally homogeneous subgroups—which may impact team functioning and individual safety behaviours. Drawing on faultlines theory, social identity theory, and conservation of resources theory, this study investigates how workgroup faultlines influence miners’ safety behaviour through the mediating roles of emotional exhaustion and safety self-efficacy. A multilevel, time-lagged survey design was employed, with data collected from 1,202 coal miners nested within 65 teams. Results from multilevel structural equation modelling indicated that stronger team faultlines were associated with higher emotional exhaustion and lower safety self-efficacy, both of which predicted lower safety behaviour. Furthermore, emotional exhaustion and safety self-efficacy sequentially mediated the relationship between faultlines and safety behaviour. These findings extend faultline research into blue-collar settings and highlight the importance of addressing subgroup dynamics to promote worker safety.