Measurement of safety climate

In Chapter 5, we introduced the concept of SHE culture. It deals with shared values and beliefs of the members of an industrial organisation that determine their commitment to the organisation s SHE management systems and achievements. We will here use the term safety climate to denote such aspects of an organisation that are possible to measure by use of a questionnaire-based survey and where the results meet statistical criteria for aggregation to the organisational level (Cox and Elin, 1998). Results of such attitude surveys are used as performance indicators at the organisational level. 

There is no general agreement on the dimensions that the safety climate is made up of. Examples of dimensions that are mentioned in the research literature are (Zohar, 1980 Brown and Holmes, 1986 Dedobbeleer and Beland, 1991 Niskanen, 1994 Cox and Elin, 1998)  

Reason has analysed the effects of an inadequate safety culture on the risk of accidents from a barrier perspective (Reason, 1998). The three conditions that he focuses on are found in the list above on safety-climate elements. First, a poor safety culture will increase the frequency of human errors and rule violations and thus also increase active barrier transgressions. Second, it will result in complacency and in unwillingness to check and maintain passive barriers adequately. Third, the organisation that is characterised by an inadequate safety climate will be unwilling to report and follow up near accidents and identified deficiencies in the barriers. 

A crucial question is, however, whether the establishment of safe behaviour is best achieved by focusing on attitudes as measured by safety-climate surveys. We must consider the other possibility, i.e. that it is more efficient to focus on behaviour directly, e.g. by use of the type of measures described in Section 18.2. When behaviour changes, attitude change will follow. 

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As pointed out by Lazar et al. (2013) outcome measures need to be harmonised. They must be rehable, valid and consistent Most outcome measures reflect a single dimension but rrltimately they must be developed to reflect the continuum of care. While we might ideally want and even require measures of safety climate and culture to correlate with outcome measures, we have tried to describe in this section the many factors that will tend to cover or weaken such correlations. 

Williamson, A., Feyer, A.-M., Caims, D. and Biancotti, D. 1997. The development of a measure of safety climate The role of safety perception and attitudes. Safety Science, 25, 15-27. 

Nmnerous approaches to the measurement of safety climate have been proposed although not all have been subject to any meaningful attempts at vahdation and there are often differences in emphasis. Davies et al. (2001) provides an excellent comparison of six proposed measures of safety chmate. 

Specific measures of safety climate vary, but a common underlying theme is leadership commitment to safety. The underlying logic is that leadership commitment to safety is often manifested in visible support in the form of resources and programs. This support results in positive perceptions of organizational commitment, which affects how people perform in the working interface. 

There are many scales that have been developed to measure safety-related variables. The majority of these focus on aspects of safety climate. It is not the intention of this chapter to examine these measures. Rather, the specific focus is on the factors which are direcdy related to new employee safety. Thus, the measures discussed in this chapter are restricted to those which measure attitudes and expectations which new employees bring to the workplace worker attitudes and behaviors which are particularly important for new employee adaption and behaviors, such as helping, which are associated with being a new employee. It is the opinion of this author that measurement provides evidence which can be presented to new employees, coworkers, and management in order to help explain the safety issues associated with new employees. Furthermore, the collection of data provides a degree of precision in terms of the issues faced by a specific organization, for a specific job, and related to the type of new employees being recruited. 

Davenport, D.L., Henderson, W.G., Mosca, C.L. et al. (2007) Risk-adjusted morbidity in teaching hospitals correlates with reported levels of communication and collaboration on surgical teams but not with scale measures of teamwork climate, safety climate, or working conditions. Journal of the American College of Surgeons, 205(6),... 

Safety culture (and/or climate) measures may themselves be regarded as proxy measures of safety in the sense outlined above. However, few studies have found these measures to be strongly related to hard risk outcomes such as injuries and accidents (Guldemnund 2000 The Health Foundation 2011). There are several reasons for this apparent lack of correlation. Safety climate or culture is, by definition, shared within a social unit (a work group), but such units are usually ill defined and small. Safety climate or culmre is multi-faceted, and each facet is a constract, as described in the previous sections of this chapter, based on a few items from a questionnaire. Although the reliability and the intra-class correlation for the constructs can be acceptable, repeated measurements are typically infeasible, and when the questionnaire has been applied repeatedly, its responsiveness (the ability of the constract to reliable measure changes over time (de Vet et al. 2011)) is usually not reported but can be expected to be low. At the same time, since... 

Safety climate surveys are well embedded as measures of safety culture in industry and have also been translated and applied in healthcare (Abdullah et al. 2009 Cox and Cheyne 2000 Cox and Cox 1991 Coyle et al. 1995 Flin et al. 2006 Helmreich arid Merritt 1998 Meams et al. 1998, 2003 Modak et al. 2007 Nieva and Sorra 2003 Smits et al. 2008 Sorra and Nieva 2004). Safety climate is regarded as the surface features of the underlying safety culture (Flin et al. 2000). Surveys typically assess workforce perceptions of procedures and behaviours in the work environment that indicate the priority given to safety. 

Colla, J.B., Bracken, A.C., Kirmey, L.M. arrd Weeks, W.B. 2005. Measuring patiertt safety climate A review of srrrveys. Quality and Safety in Health Care, 14, 364-6. 

Standards for Psychometric Testing of Safety Climate Measures... 

The cultural indicator measures the safety climate of the management system. Cultural indicators are more important than ontcome statistics in developing... 

The research into safety culture has led to the use of safety climate measurement tools as a Safety Performance Indicator (Guldenmund, 2000) but the results are largely intangible and may not help organizations identify where they need to focus attention in order to improve safety (Sorenson, 2002). The lack of a generally accepted definition for safety culture or safety chmate also limits their usefulness as concepts since they do not support a systemic methodology for their measurement (Zhang et al., 2002). 

Safety, Loss Prevention and Security are the direct responsibility of line management and are important measures of managerial performance. In order to insure that every employee is prepared to work safely, every supervisor has the responsibility to provide a safe work environment with proper equipment and adequate training. Each supervisor also has the responsibility, through personal example and the involvement of all employees, to create a climate in which everyone shares concern for the safety and security of their fellow workers and for the prevention of losses. 

For scales to measure other safety-related factors, the reader can consult Costa and Anderson (2011) for trust measures Zohar (2000) for safety climate measures Barling et al. (2002) for safety consciousness Sneddon et al. (2013) for situational awareness Neal and Griffin (2006) for safety participation and compliance Chmiel (2005) for bending the rules Cox and Cox (1991) for safety skepticism Neal et al. (2000) for safety knowledge and safety motivation Tucker et al. (2008) for employee safety voicing Tucker et al. (2008) for perceived organizational and perceived co-worker support for safety and Diaz-cabera et al. (2007) for safety culture. Another good source of information on safety measures are meta-analyses (e.g., Christian et al. 2009 Clarke 2006). 

The expected management safety behavior scale used by Burt et al. (2012) has 13 items, and both versions are shown in Table 9.5. Scale items were adapted from Chmiel s (2005) management safety climate scale, and from Walker and Hutton s (2006), scale measuring how management deal with safety. Burt et al. (2012) reported Cronbach s alphas for the new employee version of 0.92 and 0.88, and a value of 0.89 for the incumbent version. 

Mueller, L., DaSilva, N., Townsend, J., Tetrick L. (1999). An empirical evaluation of competing safety climate measurement models. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Atlanta, GA. 

Safety climate Conceptual and measurement issues , in J.C. Quick and L.E. Tetrick (eds.) Handbook of Occupational Health Psychology. American Psychological Association Washington, DC, pp. 123-142. 

From the literature it emerged that management was the key influence of an organization s safety culture. A review of the safety climate literature revealed that employee perceptions of management s attitudes and behaviors towards safety, production and issues such as planning, discipline, etc. was the most useful measurement of an organization s safety climate. (HSE, 2002, summary page)... 

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