Safety climate measures

Flin, R., Burns, C., Mearns, K. et al. (2006) Measuring safety climate in healthcare. Quality and Safety in Health Care, 15(2), 109-115. 

Flin, R., Meams, K., O Cotmor, R andBryden, R. 2000. Measuring safety climate Identifying the common features. Safety Science, 34(1-3), 177-92. 

Meams, K., Flin, R., Gordon, R. and Fleming, M. 1998. Measuring safety climate in offshore installations. Work Stress, 12, 238-54. 

Hahn, S. and Murphy, L. (2008) A short scale for measuring safety climate Safety Science 46, 1047-1066. 

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. 

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)... 

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),... 

Of conrse, this approach is based on the assumption that safety culture correlates with safety outcomes. Therefore, it is of critical importance to confirm the cnltnre-ontcome link, which is one of the requirements for a safety culture scale, understood as criterion validity - a more comprehensive summary of the required properties can be found in other literature (e.g. Itoh et al. 2012). For this applied purpose of safety culture, this chapter specifically looks at dimensions of safety culture, how to measure safety outcomes, and the safety culture-outcome link through an examination of case studies, primarily drawn from Japanese hospitals. Before stating these issues in detail, we will, in the rest of this section, briefly argue notions of safety culture (and safety climate). 

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... 

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. 

Tumberg, W. and Daniell, W. 2008. Evaluation of a healthcare safety climate measurement tool. Journal of Safety Research, 39, 563-8. 

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