Steve Roberts, Ph.D. - (540) 239-4039

Steve is co-founder and senior partner at Safety Performance Solutions, Inc. He earned an M.S. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from West Chester University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Applied/Experimental Psychology with a focus in Organizational Behavior Management from Virginia Tech. His specific areas of expertise include the design, implementation, and evaluation of behavior and people-based safety processes, the assessment of organizational culture to guide safety interventions, increasing employee involvement in safety activities, organizational management systems design, organizational leadership development, and understanding and reducing human error in the workplace.

Before co-founding Safety Performance Solutions in 1995, Dr. Roberts was a research associate with Management Systems Laboratories (MSL) and the Center for Organizational Performance Improvement of the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department of Virginia Tech and safety consultant with Make-A-Difference, Inc.

Steve has published articles in a number of peer reviewed academic journals including American Journal of Health Promotion, Applied and Preventive Psychology, Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, and Journal of Safety Research, as well as Safety + Health, Security Management, and People, Land and Water Magazines. He authored the book chapter Actively Caring for Occupational Safety: Preventing Injuries with People Based Safety, in Dr. E. Scott Geller’s 2013 book Actively Caring for People: Cultivating a Culture of Compassion. Steve is lead author for the book chapter Principles of Behavior-Based Safety in the Handbook of Safety Principles, edited by Niklas Möller of Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology, published in 2018. He is also co-author of Effective Behavior-Based Safety Coaching: Guidelines from numerous case studies in Engemann, Engemann, & Scott’s 2022 book Organizational Risk Management: Managing for Uncertainty and Ambiguity.

Steve was named among the “50 Top Safety Leaders” by Industrial Safety & Hygiene News (ISHN), is a regular speaker at both public and corporate sponsored events, and consults with clients across all industry types. Some of Steve’s consulting clients include ExxonMobil, Newmont Mining, Alpha Natural Resources, Owens Corning, Specialty Granules, JSR Micro, Boart Longyear, Pratt & Whitney, the U.S. Navy, The Hershey Company, The U.S. Geological Survey, and Marathon Petroleum. Steve also taught the ASSE Seminarfest course People-Based Safety each year from 2005 to 2018 and again in 2021, 2022, and 2023 when it transitioned to ASSP SafetyFOCUS.