On May 22, 2015, a semi-trailer truck was traveling westbound on Interstate 80 near Iowa City, Iowa, when it crashed into a bridge and became engulfed in flames (Carlson 2015). Tragically, one person was seriously hurt and another individual died as a result of injuries sustained from the accident. Across the US in 2013, there were more than 3,800 fatal crashes and 385,000 non-fatal crashes that involved at least one large truck or bus (FMCSA 2015). While the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has implemented and enforced safety practices to reduce the number and severity of accidents, clearly there is a substantial amount of additional work that needs to be pursued to improve the safety performance of firms in the US motor carrier industry. Safety is a serious concern in the trucking industry. It is of paramount importance that industry and government representatives find ways to make progress on the safety performance of motor carriers. Indeed, safety is a top priority in the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) 2012— 2016 strategic plan (U.S. DOT 2012). This study seeks to enhance our understanding of how the FMCSA can continue to improve the safety performance of commercial motor carriers by exploring the extent to which a carrier’s use of owner-operators and/or company drivers affects safety performance (e.g., state-reportable crashes). A steady stream of research has examined several factors that affect motor carrier safety performance. For example, Cantor et al. (2015) found that firm size is positively related to safety performance. Cantor et al. (2009) examined the use of electronic logbooks and found that they have a positive effect on safety performance. Corsi et al. (2014) found that unionized carriers have a positive effect on carrier safety performance because of the provision of safety and health provisions in unionization agreements. The motor carrier literature has also explored the topic of company drivers and owner-operators. From a driver-level perspective, Cantor et al. (2013) directly compared owner-operators to employee drivers and showed that owner-operators experience poorer safety performance compared to employee drivers. However, Cantor et al. (2013) found that, surprisingly, employee drivers are involved in more crashes than owner-operators. Further research is needed to understand how motor carriers are affected by the use of owner-operators because the type of driver directly affects the firm’s safety performance. This study took a further step to explore this issue from a firm-level perspective. We identified that a truck crash prediction model with a particular focus on the use of owneroperators and employee drivers does not exist in the literature. A firm-based owner-operator and employee driver safety model is needed so that the FMCSA can understand the importance of providing additional safety management resources to motor carriers that are heavily reliant upon owner-operators. To explore this issue, based on data from a larger study (Cantor et al. 2015), we created a dataset that contains equipment ownership profile information that could be used to explore the owneroperator and company driver research question. The topic of the use of owner-operators and company drivers is timely for several reasons. First, there is a serious shortage of qualified commercial motor vehicle drivers (Ferro 2015). Second, the motor carrier industry is highly competitive, and firms seek to adopt organizational strategies to remain flexible to meet customer needs. One important strategy is the outsourcing of firms’ driver and commercial motor vehicle equipment needs to third-party logistics providers in order to respond to customer pressure for capacity. Therefore, the specific focus of this study was on two important research questions. First, how does firm size relate to organizational flexibility (e.g., adoption of owner-operators or company drivers)? Second, does organizational flexibility (e.g., use of company drivers or owneroperators) affect safety performance? We adopted theoretical frameworks from the industrial organizational economics literature to explore our research questions. The next chapter provides a detailed discussion of our theoretical frameworks. (Author/publisher)
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