Modeling the Relationship between Safety Climate and Safety Performance in a Developing Construction Industry: A Cross-Cultural Validation Study

The influence of safety leadership on nurses' safety behavior: The mediating role of safety knowledge and motivation

INTRODUCTION

This paper investigates the relationships among safety leadership, safety motivation, safety knowledge, and safety behavior in the setting of a tertiary hospital in Klang Valley, Malaysia.

METHOD

Underpinned by the self-efficacy theory, we argue that high-quality safety leadership enhances nurses' safety knowledge and motivation and subsequently, improves their safety behavior (safety compliance and safety participation). A total of 332 questionnaire responses were gathered and analyzed using SmartPLS Version 3.2.9, revealing the direct effect of safety leadership on both safety knowledge and safety motivation.

RESULTS

Safety knowledge and safety motivation were found to directly and significantly predict nurses' safety behavior. Notably, safety knowledge and safety motivation were established as important mediators in the relationship between safety leadership and nurses' safety compliance and participation.

PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS

The findings of this study offer key guidance for safety researchers and hospital practitioners in identifying mechanisms to enhance safety behavior among nurses.

Linking Safety Climate and Safety Citizenship Behaviour in the Bangladeshi Garment Industry: Role of Employees’ Prosocial Motivation

Drawing on the self-determination theory, this study aimed to examine whether perceived safety climate influenced prosocial motivation, consequently affecting two types of safety citizenship behaviours: prosocial and proactive. Two-wave time-lagged data were collected from 334 readymade garment employees in Bangladesh. Hypothesised relationships were examined using analysis of moment structures (AMOS) and statistical package for the social sciences (SPSS). This study revealed that the perceived safety climate positively influenced prosocial motivation among garment employees. In addition, perceived safety climate is related to both types of safety citizenship behaviours. Moreover, this study found that the relationship between perceived safety climate and safety citizenship behaviours was mediated by prosocial motivation. This study is a pioneer in investigating the motivating mechanism of perceived safety climate to stimulate garment employees’ citizenship behaviours. These findings provide significant evidence and guidance for garment manufacturers and managers to bolster garment employees’ prosocial and proactive safety behaviours.

Safety climate in marble industry and its influence on safety performance and occupational accidents

To examine the influence of safety climate perception and safety performance on safety outcomes in the form of near misses and injuries a cross-sectional survey was conducted with 562 employees in twelve marble factories in Diyarbakır, Turkey. Study findings revealed that safety communication, management's safety commitment and safety training in the workplace influenced safety performance of workers most. Overall results suggest that improvement in the level of safety performance was associated with a reduction in accidents. Safety communication was the most significant dimension of safety climate to reduce near misses and injuries. When socio-demographics of employees were considered, the means of perception of safety systems in workplace was lower among younger groups. While participants from lower educated groups were more likely to care about safety performance, participants with high income were more likely to perceive management's safety commitment, safety training, and safety communication. These findings are important for management and employees of marble factories since they provide evidence about the factors that firms can consider to reduce occupational accidents and encourage safety performance in workplaces.

Resilient Safety Culture and Safety Performance: Examining the Effect in Malaysian Paramedic Training Institute through Importance-Performance Map Analysis (IPMA)

An increasing number of studies have shown that safety culture factors have a substantial influence on safety performance in a variety of industrial sectors. These factors’ impact on safety performance are unclear, especially at public service and statutory authorities. On the other hand, the understanding of indicators for safety performance in every working sector in Malaysia is continuing to progress. Hence, this study’s contribution is to explore the influence of safety culture factors (i.e., management commitment and supervision in safety, safety system) and safety competence on safety performance in government paramedic training institutes. Importance-performance map analysis (IPMA) is a technique used in Smart PLS to determine the significance and performance of each of these factors. The study was conducted via an online survey and involved 258 safety and health committee members in the Ministry of Health paramedic training institute. As a matter of relevance, the IPMA’s empirical data study revealed that management commitment and supervision in safety were the predominant factors in determining safety performance. Meanwhile, for performance, the findings showed that worker involvement, safety system, and safety competence perform well in determining safety performance.

Associations Between Work-Zone Groups and Compensation Claims: Experience From a Poultry Meat Processing Plant

OBJECTIVE

At a poultry meat processing plant, work-zone group was an influencing factor upon an intervention program aimed at reducing musculoskeletal disorders (MSD), and also upon safety climate and disability management practices. This study aimed to explore if compensation claim outcomes also differed across work-zones in this plant.

METHODS

De-identified workers' compensation claims data from the processor were categorized according to three main work-zones (kill, process, and despatch). Multivariable generalized linear modeling explored the compensation claims costs across these work-zones, adjusted for age, shift, and claim type.

RESULTS

For MSDs, costs per claim were 3.5 times lower in the kill-zone compared to the despatch-zone. Shift worked and claim type were significant covariates in the modeling.

CONCLUSION

Organizations should prioritize interventions within work-zones with poorer compensation outcomes and consider the association of organizational microclimates upon these claims.

Measuring Safety Climate in the Construction Industry: A Systematic Literature Review

Recent studies on safety in various fields use the concept of safety climate to explain the causes of safety accidents. Many studies attempt to measure the safety climates and identify the causes for accidents in the high-risk construction industry. Studies have shown that the higher the level of the safety climate, the lower the accident rate at construction sites. Methods of measuring safety climate, including the NOSACQ-50 survey, have been presented. Studies on the methodology of measuring safety climate should be continued to improve reliability and precision. Although many studies have been conducted to measure safety climate, such as questionnaires, regression analysis, and suggestions for safety climate measurement methods, there are few studies on a systematic literature review of them. This requires a systematic literature review (SLR) of the studies conducted so far. This study conducted an SLR on the definition and measurement methods of safety climate in the construction industry published since 2000, when safety climate’s impact on accidents began to be established. This review study utilized the PRISMA method, analyzed 735 studies, and selected 57 papers finally. SLR was carried out for selected research works, and the results were summarized. There are three methods to measure safety climate: literature survey, questionnaire, and data analysis. Factor analysis, development of measuring model, development of questionnaire, statistical analysis, and machine learning were investigated as their sub-methods. This study’s results can be used as fundamental sources for improving existing methods and developing new methods of measuring safety climate in the construction industry.

Perceptions of Safety Climate in Construction Projects between Workers and Managers/Supervisors in the Developing Country of Iran

What are the different perceptions on safety climate (SC) by workers and managers/supervisors engaged in the construction industry of developing countries? Reconciling these two differing views is pivotal for mitigating and avoiding both the injured and fatal accidents in the construction industry, especially in those developing countries where safety conditions are poor and unpredictable, and safety measures are inadequate in most cases. To answer this research question, the collective perceptions of 118 construction workers and 123 managers/supervisors on the SC in construction projects in Iran were gleaned and investigated. In particular, these perceptions were initially collected by two different empirical surveys validated by a sample of university professors and construction managers and then analyzed through the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) test and Bartlett’s test of sphericity under factor analysis, together with a one-sample t-test. Results indicated that “workers’ attitudes and perceptions”, “safety knowledge and training”, “working relationships and roles of colleagues”, and “workers’ risk perceptions” are important categories of SC factors perceived by construction workers, whereas “safety rules and management practices” is the essential category of SC factors discerned by managers/supervisors. The difference in perceptions between workers and managers/supervisors is considered to be beneficial for an overall understanding of SC in general and for developing countries in particular. Moreover, a series of effective suggestions for improving SC in the construction industry of developing countries are provided with reference to each category. The views of SC factors are reinforced as a social process combining the synergies of workers and managers/supervisors, as well as proper safety training to be pushed forward as an essential activity that should be incorporated in human resources development of construction organizations so as to improve the existing level of SC, leading to fewer accidents at the industry level.

Synergetic effect of safety culture and safety climate on safety performance in SMEs: does transformation leadership have a moderating role?

Objectives. In developing countries, health and safety is not given importance especially in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Incidents in health and safety are continuously increasing. The major reason is a lack of workplace safety culture. Secondly, enterprises lack resources, therefore it becomes hard for them to provide safety climate. Along with safety climate and safety culture, the behavior of leadership plays a significant role toward safety performance. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to analyze the moderating role of leadership for gaining safety performance through safety culture and safety climate. Methods. For the said purpose, the authors collected data from laborers and managers. A structured questionnaire was adopted and, after ensuring the reliability, structural equation modeling was applied. Results. The findings revealed that safety culture and safety climate both have a significant impact over safety performance; however, transformational leadership only moderates the relationship between safety culture and safety performance. Conclusions. Identification of the moderating role of transformational leadership is a significant contribution in social cognitive theory. Future researchers are also guided to identify the same link for large industries of developing countries.

Impact of Safety Culture on Safety Performance; Mediating Role of Psychosocial Hazard: An Integrated Modelling Approach

We conceptualize that safety culture (SC) has a positive impact on employee’s safety performance by reducing their psychosocial hazards. A higher level of safety culture environment reduces psychosocial hazards by improving employee’s performance toward safety concerns. The purpose of this study was to evaluate how psychosocial hazard mediates the relationship between safety culture and safety performance. Data were collected from 380 production employees in three states of Malaysia from the upstream oil and gas sector. Structural equation modeling was implemented to test the suggested hypotheses. The proposed model was evaluated using structural equation modeling. A stratified sampling with a Likert 5-point scale was used to distribute the questionnaires. Furthermore, the proposed model was tested using the simulation of the structural equation and partial. According to our findings, all hypotheses were significant. A review of prior studies was used to select the items of the dimension for the data collection. Safety culture was assessed with psychosocial hazard to determine its direct and indirect impact on safety performance. Results suggest that to enhance safety performance (leading and lagging), psychosocial concerns in the workplace environments should be taken into consideration by employees. In addition, the findings showed that the psychosocial hazard fully mediates the relationship between safety culture and safety performance.

Safety Climate and the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Investigation on Safety Perceptions among Farmers in Italy

The diffusion of the COVID-19 pandemic has generated numerous interventions aimed at reducing the contagion by means of specific prevention measures, also characterized by stricter occupational health and safety (OHS) procedures at the workplace. To better understand how this novel working context has impacted on farmers’ safety behavior and attitude, a safety climate assessment was carried out by means of the Nordic Safety Climate Questionnaire (NOSACQ-50), which was augmented to include specific items related to the modifications of working conditions due to COVID-19. This allowed us to analyze changes in safety climate perceptions, pointing out worker-manager discrepancies in safety behavior and attitude. Additionally, the COVID-19 questionnaire contributed to analyzing the effects of the specific OHS measures due to the pandemic from the workers’ standpoint. Results showed that concerns related to the COVID-19 pandemic have augmented the attention paid to OHS, demonstrating a correlation between the safety climate dimensions and the OHS measures due to COVID-19. Besides, farmers’ risk-taking behavior and attitude appeared still critical, highlighting the need for more specific and contextual interventions in terms of safety information and training. Overall, this study aims to expand knowledge on shared safety awareness and perceptions in the COVID-19 period.

Safety Leadership, Safety Attitudes, Safety Knowledge and Motivation toward Safety-Related Behaviors in Electrical Substation Construction Projects

Poor safety conditions and performance are consequences of individual factors as well as organizational and group factors. However, little attention has been afforded to the sequential impact of these factors on safety-related behaviors (compliance and participation) in the Saudi Arabian electrical construction industry. This study examines the causal effects of leadership and attitudes on safety compliance and participation mediated by motivation and knowledge. The research collected 636 surveys in electrical construction projects for nine large contractors between November 2018 and July 2019 in Saudi Arabia. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to determine the mechanism by which leadership and attitudes affected safety compliance and participation through motivation and knowledge. The results indicate that safety leadership and attitude factors as well as their interactions predicted safety motivation and knowledge. Additionally, these factors affected safety participation and compliance via workers' motivation and knowledge. Safety motivation and safety knowledge positively affected workers' participation and compliance. Management should encourage and regularly assess effective leadership and attitudes and developing motivation and knowledge among employees can improve organizations' safety-related behavior performance.

NOSACQ-50 for Safety Climate Assessment in Agricultural Activities: A Case Study in Central Italy

Safety climate assessment has been recognized as a powerful tool to bring to light workers' perceptions related to safety practices, attitudes and behaviors at the workplace. Accordingly, its investigation can provide useful information about safety problems within a company before accidents occur. In literature, numerous studies can be found investigating safety climates in different types of industry. However, safety climate assessment in agricultural activities is addressed scarcely, even though agriculture represents a very hazardous sector. To reduce this gap, the present study proposes an investigation of safety climate among farmers by means of the Nordic Safety Climate Questionnaire (NOSACQ-50). The results of the survey brought to light a low level of safety perception of the interviewed sample, especially as concerns safety commitment and risk-taking attitudes. In particular, a different attitude toward safety issues has been registered depending on both the position and gender of the interviewed farmers. Overall, the output of this cross-sectional analysis adds to the current literature by expanding knowledge of safety climate among farmers, representing a baseline for further investigations based on human-centered approaches to enhance safety in agriculture and consequently social and workplace aspects of sustainable agricultural systems.

Determinants for Safety Climate Evaluation of Construction Industry Sites in Saudi Arabia

The hazardous nature of the construction industry requires giving increasing attention to safety management and the available means to eliminate or reduce the risks of workers' injuries. Workers in the construction industry of Saudi Arabia face similar daily risks as workers face in other countries. The safety climate significantly influences safety performance, making research in the field of safety climate a vital step toward raising safety levels at construction sites. This study aims at exploring key components of determinants for safety climate evaluation of Saudi Arabian construction sites. Using data collected from 401 industry practitioners, a dimension reduction statistical approach and exploratory factor/principal component analysis were conducted on 13 safety climate factors that were found to significantly correlate with safety climate evaluation of construction sites. The study revealed three key components of determinants for safety climate evaluation of Saudi Arabian construction sites. Notable components are safety commitment, safety interaction, and safety support. Implications of this study include assisting construction industry stakeholders to bolster the safety climate at their construction sites, which should lead to improved safety performance levels.

Safety Climate Perceptions in the Construction Industry of Saudi Arabia: The Current Situation

Workers’ wellbeing and safety is important in the construction industry due to the high risk of accidents. Safety climate development is a positive initial step toward raising the safety levels of construction practitioners. This study aims at revealing the factors influencing safety climate perceptions in the construction industry of Saudi Arabia. A set of extracted factors from the literature was validated and used to design a comprehensive questionnaire survey. Data was collected from 401 personnel working on 3 large construction project sites in Saudi Arabia. Descriptive statistics and the crosstabulation algorithm, Kendall’s tau-b correlation test, were used to analyze the data. The study revealed a set of 13 factors influencing safety climate perceptions, which are: Supervision, guidance and inspection, appraisal of risks and hazards, social security and health insurance, workmate influences, management safety justice, management commitment to safety, education and training, communication, workers’ safety commitment, workers’ attitude toward health and safety, workers’ involvement, supportive environment, and competence. The results also indicate the significant and anticipated role of top management in safety climate at sites. Implications of this study include assisting construction industry stakeholders to better understand and enhance safety climate, which in turn will lead to improved safety behavior, culture, motivation, and performance.

Relationship between safety measures and human error in the construction industry: working at heights

In recent years, falling from heights has been reported as the primary cause of fatalities within the Australian construction industry. While there is substantial literature exploring safety and human error in an attempt to decrease the occurrences of accidents through the implementation of organizational and physical hazard-related strategies, little attention has been brought towards the impact of psychological distress on the relationship between human error and safety measures. Therefore, this article aims at examining the relationship between safety measures and human error with the objective of identifying the impact of psychological distress among workers working at heights within the construction industry on the relationship. This study found that human error can occur as a result of psychological distress and therefore provides a foundation for future research to explore whether proper implementation of psychological safety measures could decrease the occurrence of human failures and accidents when working at heights.

Couchsurfing involvement in non-profit peer-to-peer accommodations and its impact on destination image, familiarity, and behavioral intentions

Accommodation is a fundamental part of tourism, and it plays an important role in the tourist experience. The emerging economy and especially the peer-to-peer accommodations (P2P) have shaken up the conventional accommodations sector. While most P2P accommodation studies have focused on the monetary platform, which includes Airbnb, there is little knowledge about the linkages of involvement and behavioral intentions on the non-profit accommodation users. This empirical study applied a multiple-methods approach to investigate the positive impacts of involvement on couchsurfing, such as P2P accommodations on the destination image, familiarity, and the behavioral intentions. The data was collected from 609 travelers who have used couchsurfing while traveling to Turkey from 2016 to 2017. The results revealed that involvement in couchsurfing improved the destination image, familiarity, the E-WoM, and the revisit intention of couchsurfers. This study also discusses the practical implications.

Identification of the H&S (Health and Safety Factors) Involved in Infrastructure Projects in Developing Countries-A Sequential Mixed Method Approach of OLMT-Project

Urbanization is playing a key role in big cities of developing countries, which, in effect, is increasing the population. This study takes care of the mega infrastructure project (Orange Line Metro Train (OLMT)) to explore and identify the H&S (Health and Safety) factors that affect the local residents and the main key stakeholders working on the project. A Sequential Mixed-Method approach of the OLMT-project includes qualitative and quantitative methods were adopted. The data have been collected from the targeted population working on the OLMT-project through a questionnaire. The main key finding of the study indicates that poor planning and a lack of communication between the public and government led to frustration. The most significant factors that identified in the study were unsafe to work practice, project scope constraints, lack in technical and material support, unsafe/bad condition, health/environment degradation, declination and loss of resources and time, no proper emergency system, and negligence in adopting safety rules and laws. The study also revealed that the consensus should also be noticed between the key stakeholders (e.g., contractors, clients, safety officials, academia) in the second round of the Delphi survey of the project. The study findings will help the key stakeholders to prioritize their energies towards attaining zero levels of inadequate health and safety practices in infrastructure projects. The study outcomes can also be generalized for the other developing countries having a similar work scenario.

Using Improved Principal Component Analysis to Explore Construction Accident Situations from the Multi-Dimensional Perspective: A Chinese Study

The improvement of the macro-level accident situation in the Chinese construction industry is currently an urgent task for the government due to the high accident rate. This study intends to use improved principal component analysis to explore the accident situations in the Chinese construction industry from a multi-dimensional perspective, aiming at providing targeted direction on the improvement of the accident situation for the government. Six composite indicators that can quantify the accident situation are firstly selected based on a wide review of the literature and interviews with safety experts, with the original data collected from China institutions. The classical principal component analysis is then improved to examine the correlations between indicators, and further to evaluate accident situations in China provinces. Finally, the features of accident situations are explored and analyzed from a multi-dimensional perspective. The findings show that the improved principal component analysis can retain more dispersion degree information of the original data. Meanwhile, three principal components including the accident frequency, trend, and severity were extracted to quantify the accident situation, and a hierarchical indicator system for the comprehensive evaluation of the accident situation was constructed to deeper understand multi-dimensional characteristics of China’s accident situations. Furthermore, there exist great regional differences of accident situations in Chinese provinces. From the overall perspective, the accident situation shows a declining trend from the western backward region to the highly developed eastern coastal region. This study provides a multi-dimensional perspective for the government to formulate safety regulations and improve the accident situation.

Validation of a pre-existing safety climate scale for the Turkish furniture manufacturing industry

Understanding the safety climate level is essential to implement a proactive safety program. The objective of this study is to explore the possibility of having a safety climate scale for the Turkish furniture manufacturing industry since there has not been any scale available. The questionnaire recruited 783 subjects. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) tested a pre-existing safety scale's fit to the industry. The CFA indicated that the structures of the model present a non-satisfactory fit with the data (χ ² = 2033.4, df = 314, p ≤ 0.001; root mean square error of approximation = 0.08, normed fit index = 0.65, Tucker-Lewis index = 0.65, comparative fit index = 0.69, parsimony goodness-of-fit index = 0.68). The results suggest that a new scale should be developed and validated to measure the safety climate level in the Turkish furniture manufacturing industry. Due to the hierarchical structure of organizations, future studies should consider a multilevel approach in their exploratory factor analyses while developing a new scale.