Safety climate scales

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. 

Shannon, H.S. and Norman, G.R. 2009. Deriving the factor structure of safety climate scales. Safely Science, 47(3), 327-9. 

Seo, D.-C., Torabi, M.R., Blair, E.H. and Ellis, N.T. 2004. A cross-validation of safety climate scale using confirmatory factor analytic approach. Journal of Safety Research, 35(4), 427-45. 

Huang YH, Zohar D, Robcatson MM, Garabet A, Lee J, Murphy LA (2013) Development and validation of safety climate scales for lone workers using truck drivers as exemplar. Transp Res F Traffic Psychol Behav 17 5-19... 

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). 

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 Climate in the Industries—elements from Hahn s et al (2008) Likert scale with six items were used in the questionnaire. 

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

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