Safety climate: its nature and predictive power

The field of organisational climate and of specific aspects such as safety climate, has produced a number of theoretical and empirical scientific contributions, and their applied interest is self-evident. The concept of safety climate, which is the main focus of this paper, emerged in the wake of the seminal work by Zohar (1980). The safety climate construct has been used in the literature on safety at work, as either an antecedent of accident rates or as an aspect to be measured for the correct assessment of company safety, or even as consequence of organisational features and actions such as type of company, size and safety investment. However, theoretical development of the concept has not been paralleled by appropriate empirical assessment, especially in the Spanish context. The aim of this paper is to test empirically the main theoretical properties of safety climate through multilevel statistical models, well-suited to this type of research design. Its specific objectives are: a) to empirically test the safety climate property of shared perception; b) to test the predictive power of safety climate in relation to accident rates; and c) to study the relative importance of the different safety climate dimensions in the context of Spanish industry, while statistically controlling for physical aspects of occupational safety

The complexity, stability and diagnostic power of the safety climate concept

The complexity, stability and diagnostic power of the safety climate concep

The effects of organizational and individual factors on occupational accidents

This study examined the relationships between individual psychological, work environment and organizational variables and occupational accidents using structural equation modelling with latent variables. A series of nested explicative models of the relationships between these variables was derived. Data were collected from a wide range of industrial sectors in the Valencia region of Spain using structured interviews. In total, 525 valid questionnaires were completed and these formed the basis for the subsequent analyses. Analysis showed that the model in the series that proposed relationships between all the latent variables provided the best representation of the data. This supported the broad hypothesis that each of the variables has an effect on accidents and also showed that the individual level variables, including safe behaviour and general heath, mediate the indirect effects from the organizational variables. The final model showed that individual safe behaviour is strongly predicted within the model, although it is mainly related to organizational involvement in safety and not directly to perceptions of the physical work environment. An important role is played in the final model by participants' evaluations of organizational involvement in safety and this is consistent with earlier work highlighting the importance of management commitment to, and action on, safety issues. Finally, the model supported the proposal that stress processes mediate the effects of both organizational and environmental variables