The Shelf Life of a Safety Climate Assessment: How Long Until the Relationship with Safety-Critical Incidents Expires?

A tale of six climates: Reflections and learnings after the development of six industry-specific safety climate scales

INTRODUCTION

Researchers are finding merits in utilizing industry-specific safety climate scales that capture the nuances of context, and tend to show stronger associations with safety behavior and outcomes like incidents. Yet, to date, guidance around the practicalities of developing and validating such industry-specific scales is lacking in the safety science literature.

METHOD

In this paper we outline our experiences developing six industry-specific safety climate scales and highlight strengths and limitations of our approach. We also briefly review the industry-specific safety climate literature and offer highlights for consideration when developing such scales. Our method to develop industry-specific safety climate scales followed an established best practice structure: literature review of existing published industry scales, collation and review of existing scale items, consultation interviews with industry experts, item drafting, exploratory and confirmatory statistical analyses, and finally, a real-world ecological validity test.

RESULTS

Our research highlighted the diversity of safety climate dimensions (both the conceptual and content domains of each dimension) when it is considered at an industry level. Also, the literature reviews revealed a dearth of industry-specific safety climate scales in the areas we engaged with, so our project filled a glaring gap in research and practice. Best practice safety climate scale development methods are provided to stimulate further research.

CONCLUSIONS

We conclude with reflections on the nature of safety climate within and across industries, and offer suggestions for future lines of research across other contexts (e.g., national culture, geography, and regulatory settings). We suggest that industry-specific safety climate scales have a specific use case, such as identifying specific areas to improve and evaluating the impact of safety interventions.

PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS

This article provides applications for both applied researchers (to improve capabilities in safety climate scale development) and practitioners who wish to measure organisational safety climate and design effective interventions. Engaging with regulators to build safety climate scales is powerful because their personnel have rich experiences to share across multiple workplaces. Organisational researchers can engage with survey panels to build robust scales. Finally, industry-specific nuances can lead to richer insights into an organisation's safety climate.

Adapting, adopting, and advancing change: A framework for future research in the psychology of occupational safety

INTRODUCTION

While there are numerous reviews of the research on the psychology of occupational safety, these studies provide weak guidance on where the research should go next. Accordingly, we introduce a simple framework for thinking about future research in this area: the adapting, adopting, and advancing change framework. This framework summarizes how external, technological, and theoretical developments have driven research in the psychology of occupational safety and uses these observations as evidence to imagine ways in which they may continue to do so.

METHOD

We critically reviewed seminal research in the psychology of occupational safety using the adapting, adopting, and advancing change framework. Adapting to change means considering external changes such as the fluctuating nature of work and the labor market. Adopting change refers to incorporating the latest technological and technical advances to facilitate more robust research methods and analyses. Finally, advancing change refers to theoretical advances and how they will push psychology of occupational safety research forward.

RESULTS

We highlight several avenues for future research that emerge at the convergence of the framework's three themes, including developing the safety skill construct, assessing variation in demand appraisals on safety outcomes, distinguishing safety climate from related constructs, and examining safety constructs that are usually considered as outcomes (e.g., injuries) as predictors instead.

CONCLUSIONS

In doing so, we provide a clear structure to help researchers better identify the most effective directions for future research on the psychology of occupational safety.

Development and testing of a tool to measure the organizational safety climate aboard US Navy ships

INTRODUCTION

Safety climate is a critical human factor that can increase safety-related behaviors and reduce accidents. This research reports on a three-phase program of development and validation of a safety climate survey tool initiated by U.S. Naval Surface Forces after numerous accidents and near misses.

METHOD

The initial survey was administered to 4,042 sailors aboard 30 warships, and factor analysis supported a three-factor measure of a safety climate composed of operational compliance, positive work environment, and organizational resources. The predictive validity of the newly developed safety climate measure was tested against the number of accidents reported in the 12 months after the safety climate survey.

RESULTS

This analysis revealed that a positive work environment and operational compliance were linked to fewer accidents; surprisingly, organizational resources were linked to more accidents. Implications for future research on safety climate and occupational safety are discussed.

Associations between safety climate and safety management practices in the construction industry

BACKGROUND

Safety climate, a group-level measure of workers' perceptions regarding management's safety priorities, has been suggested as a key predictor of safety outcomes. However, its relationship with actual injury rates is inconsistent. We posit that safety climate may instead be a parallel outcome of workplace safety practices, rather than a determinant of workers' safety behaviors or outcomes.

METHODS

Using a sample of 25 commercial construction companies in Colombia, selected by injury rate stratum (high, medium, low), we examined the relationship between workers' safety climate perceptions and safety management practices (SMPs) reported by safety officers.

RESULTS

Workers' perceptions of safety climate were independent of their own company's implementation of SMPs, as measured here, and its injury rates. However, injury rates were negatively related to the implementation of SMPs.

CONCLUSIONS

Safety management practices may be more important than workers' perceptions of safety climate as direct predictors of injury rates.

Workplace safety

Unsafe work environments have clear consequences for both individuals and organizations. As such, an ever-expanding research base is providing a greater understanding of the factors that affect workplace safety across organizational levels. However, despite scientific advances, the workplace safety literature suffers from a lack of theoretical and empirical integration that makes it difficult for organizational scientists to gain a comprehensive sense of (a) what we currently know about workplace safety and (b) what we have yet to learn. This review addresses these shortcomings. First, the authors provide a formal definition of workplace safety and then create an integrated safety model (ISM) based on existing theory to summarize current theoretical expectations with regard to workplace safety. Second, the authors conduct a targeted review of the safety literature and compare extant empirical findings with the ISM. Finally, the authors use the results of this review to articulate gaps between theory and research and then make recommendations for both theoretical and empirical improvements to guide and integrate future workplace safety research.