Safety- climate

The practice of universal precautions is Federal Law in the United States, and it is the responsibility of every employer or institution that healthcare workers have the resources and training necessary to adhere to these safety precautions.Additionally, support for continued practice of universal precautions needs to come from all levels of administration. Observations by Gershon et al. indicate that one of the strongest correlates with compliance is the institutional safety climate.This implies that if healthcare workers perceive their work environment to be conducive to practicing universal precautions, then they will be more likely to do so. 

Clarke, S. (2006). The relationship between safety climate and safety performance A meta-analytic review. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 77(4), 315-327. 

Gillen, M. D., Baltz, D., Gassel, M., Kirsch, L., Vaccaro, D. (2002). Perceived safety climate, job demands, and coworker support among union and nonunion injured constiuction workers. 

Probst, T. M., Estrada, A. X. (2009). Aeeident under-reporting among employees Testing the moderating inlluenee of psyehologieal safety climate and supervisor enfOTcement of safely praetiees. Accident Analysis and Prevention, 42(5), 1438—1444. 

Ring, J. K. (2010). The effeet of perceived organizational support and safety climate on voluntary turnover in the transportation industry. International Journal of Business Research and Management, 1, 156-168. 

Zohar, D. (1980). Safety climate in industrial organizations Theoretical and applied implications. 

Neal, A., Griffin, M. A. (2004). Safety climate and safety at work. In J. Barling M. Frone (Eds.), TTte psychology of work place safety (pp. 15-34). Washington, DC American Psychological Association. 

Group cohesion is strongly linked to shared beliefs and values, and intensity of normative pressures to conform (Trice and Beyer 1993). Within the safety literature considerable attention has been devoted to safety climate (e.g., Bosak et al. 2013), which also has strong links to shared beliefs and values, but specific to safety issues, and also has a normative influence on group or team member s behavior. The factors which define safety climate are reasonably well understood (e.g., Clarke 2006), and it is also clear that a strong safety climate is positively associated... 

Bosak, J., Coetsee, W. J., Cullinane, S. (2013). Safety climate dimensions as predictors for risk behavior. Accident Analysis and Prevention, 55, 256-264. 

Kath, L. M., Magley, V. J., Marmet, M. (2010a). The role of organizational tiust in safety climate s influence on organizational outcomes. Accident Analysis and Prevention, 42, 1488-1497. 

Kath, L. M., Marks, K. M., Ranney, J. (2010b). Safety climate dimensions, leader-member exchange, and organizational support as predictors of upward safety communication in a sample of rail industry workers. Safety Science, 48, 643-650. 

Luria, G. (2010). The social aspects of safety management Tiust and safety climate. Accident Analysis and Prevention, 42, 1288-1295. 

Hofmann, D. A., Morgeson, F. P., Geitas, S. J. (2003). Climate as a moderator of the relationship between leader-member exchange and content specific citizenship Safety climate as an exemplar. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88, 170-178. 

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). 

Organizations vary considerably in terms of how they manage safety. Thus, the expectations of management safety behavior formed from one workplace may have little basis in reality in another workplace. At this point, it is also worth noting the vast literature on safety culture and safety climate. Safety culture stems from the organization and is the top-down safety values, beliefs, and norms, while safety climate is more accurately defined as the employee s perceptions of how various aspects of the working environment impact on their safety (see Bjerkan 2010, for a... 

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. 

Neal, A., Griffin, M. A. (2006). A study of the lagged relationship among safety climate, safety motivation, safety behavior, and accidents at the individual and group levels. Journal of Applied Psychology, 91(4), 946-953. 

Neal, A., Griffin, M. A., Hart, P. M. (2000). The impact of organizational climate on safety climate and individual behavior. Safety Science, 54(1-3), 99-109. 

Zohar, D. (2000). A group-level model of safety climate testing the effect of group climate on microaccidents in manufacturing jobs. Journal of Applied Psychology, S5(4), 587-596. 

Other key ideas within the cognitive theories that are often employed within social research are those of values, attitudes and beliefs (Baron et a/. 2006). These elements are often seen as the basic criteria of many social phenomena, including the highly complex concept of culture, although it is attitudes, the inherent disposition to respond favourably or unfavourably to an object/person/ event (Aronson et a/. 2007), that are most frequently used, due to their accessibility through tools such as questionnaires or observed behaviours (Ajzen 2005). In construction, safety management often draws on this way of thinking in the use of safety climate surveys. 

Glendon, A.I. (2008) Safety culture and safety climate how far have we come and where could we be heading Journal of Occupational Health and Safety Australia and New Zealand, 24(3), 249-71. 

Health and Safety Executive (2005) A Review of Safety Culture and Safety Climate Literature for the Development of the Safety Culture Inspection Toolkit, RR367. HSE Books, Suffolk. 

Mohamed, S. (2002) Safety climate in construction site environments. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 128(5), 375-84. 

Dov, Z. (2008) Safety climate and beyond a multi-level multi-climate framework. Safety Science, 46(3), 376-87. 

Situational factors include many elements, such as familiarity and training, risk perception, rewards and punishment, cost of compliance which is regarded as a critical factor to compliance intent and behavior. Safety climate belongs to organizational element which is made up of... 

---