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Safety climate: New developments in conceptualization, theory, and research
Accident Analysis and Prevention 42 (2010) 1421–1422
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Accident Analysis and Prevention journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/aap
Editorial note
Safety climate: New developments in conceptualization, theory, and research a r t i c l e Keyword: Safety climate
i n f o
a b s t r a c t Although the important role of safety climate in safety outcomes has been established and many studies have been done by scholars in different disciplines and across different cultures, there are still gaps in the literature. The articles in this Special Issue explore the topics of new developments in the conceptualization of safety climate and occupational/industry-focused studies of safety climate, with the goal of identifying different challenges and findings that arise within or across various occupations or industries. We are pleased to have a closing article by Dr. Dov Zohar on “Thirty Years of Safety Climate Research: Reflections and Future Directions.” © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
In 2007 there were around 4 million nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses in the U.S. which, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), occurred at a rate of 4.2 cases per 100 equivalent full-time workers. That same year there were also 5657 fatal occupational injuries (United States Department of Labor, 2009). These statistics are concerning, especially since the BLS has been shown to undercount injuries associated with chronic or acute conditions (Rosenman et al., 2006). These data illustrate the continuing need to identify ways to reduce workplace accidents and injuries and to improve overall workplace safety. Efforts to increase workplace safety encompass several areas. Standard interventions employed to reduce risk can be grouped within four broad categories: engineering (e.g., redesigning a tool or installing machine guards); administrative (e.g., changing job procedures or rotating workers through a particular job); personal protective equipment (e.g., protective glasses or hearing protection); and education and training (ANSI, 2005). Although there is general agreement that both management leadership and employee participation are critical to the success of reducing injury risk (ANSI, 2005), until recently, most intervention efforts have relied on a traditional engineering approach. In an attempt to make further improvements, risk managers and safety directors are exploring organizational and psychosocial factors in the workplace to complement other approaches. One of the most prominent factors currently under consideration is that of safety climate (Zohar, 1980; Hofmann and Stetzer, 1998; Glendon and Litherland, 2001; Shannon et al., 2001; Gillen et al., 2002). Safety climate is an organizational factor commonly cited as an important antecedent of safety in the workplace. Zohar (1980) was one of the first to introduce the concept of safety climate as a way to describe employees’ perceptions of the value and role of safety within their organizations. Specifically, safety climate refers to the workers’ perceptions of the organization’s policies, procedures, and practices as they relate to the value, importance, and actual priority of safety within the organization. The practical and theoretical 0001-4575/$ – see front matter © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.aap.2009.12.007
significance of safety climate as a construct derives from its ability to predict safety behavior and safety-related outcomes (e.g., workplace accidents and injuries) in a wide variety of settings, and across cultures (e.g., Nahrgang et al., 2008; Christian et al., 2009). Theoretically, safety climate provides a framework to guide the safety behavior of employees in such a way that they develop perceptions and expectations regarding safety behavior outcomes and, thus, behave accordingly (Zohar, 1980). In large part, workers develop these perceptions and expectations about the priority and importance of safety by observing the actions of their supervisors (Zohar, 2000). Safety climate predicts employees’ motivation to work safely, which affects employees’ safety behaviors and subsequent experiences of workplace injuries or incidents (Mueller et al., 1999; Griffin and Neal, 2000; Zohar, 2003). It has also been directly associated with increases in safety behaviors (Hofmann and Stetzer, 1996; Hofmann et al., 2003) and decreases in workplace injuries (Hofmann and Stetzer, 1996; Zohar, 2002; Huang et al., 2006). The number of studies on safety climate has increased dramatically in recent years from the first one in 1980 to a total of 130 articles published in peer-reviewed journals through 2008 (similar to the figure in Glendon (2008) on safety culture/climate, distribution of these 130 safety climate articles by year is illustrated in Fig. 1). Researchers from various countries have begun paying attention to it. This is echoed in the fact that the 33 manuscripts originally submitted to our Special Issue were generated from 17 different countries. Although the important role of safety climate in safety outcomes has been established and many studies have been done by scholars in different disciplines, there are still gaps in the literature. Our initial call for manuscripts for our Special Issue focused on three specific areas of safety climate in order to help fill the gaps and give a focus to the research. The first theme of the special issue is on the topic of new developments in the conceptualization of safety climate. Possible themes or questions to explore: what are safety climate and safety culture
1422
Editorial note / Accident Analysis and Prevention 42 (2010) 1421–1422
References
Fig. 1. Year of publication of 130 peer-reviewed journal articles on safety climate. Note: APA PsycNET search engine, which included both psychology and safety journals, was used to search for the topic “Safety Climate” in abstracts of peer-reviewed journal articles.
and how do they differ; what should safety climate dimensions encompass; how is safety climate formed or developed; how should safety climate be measured; how should safety climate scores be validated. Further, although extensive prior research has shown that safety climate predicts safety-related outcomes, relatively few studies have conducted interventions that attempts to improve safety climate. Therefore, the second topic is to provide a sampling of the most recent research being conducted on interventions to improve safety climate. Finally, in the safety climate literature, some studies have been conducted within a single organization or industry, whereas other studies have focused on workers across work settings. It is important to contrast safety climate research conducted within versus across occupations or industries. Thus, the final topic of the special issue is on occupation/industry-focused studies of safety climate, with the goal of identifying different challenges and findings that arise within or across various occupations or industries. In this special issue, we are pleased that numerous papers were submitted from various countries and we were able to identify several excellent papers on the topic. Quite a few submitted articles focused on new developments in the conceptualization of safety climate. Among the accepted articles authors explored issues with that impact on safety climate, such as organizational tenure, permanent and temporary workers, organizational trust, workforce commitment, and labor union values were explored. A multilevel study examined the role of safety climate on accident under-reporting, bringing the theory of planned behavior and a new analytical approach (dominance analysis) into the equation. Several articles addressed safety climate in different industries, such as the rail industry, the retail trade, the industrial workplace, health care, the petroleum sector, and the manufacturing sector. However, no appropriate studies were identified in terms of interventions to improve safety climate. We would like to encourage more studies on interventions which target on improving safety climate for the industries. Also important are new studies which target on the predictors of safety climate which can serve as potential factors for interventions. We would like to thank all 33 authors who submitted manuscripts and the approximately 40 expert reviewers who contributed to making this special issue come to life. A special thank you to Dr. Zohar for the closing article on “Thirty Years of Safety Climate Research: Reflections and Future Directions.”
ANSI, 2005. American National Standard for Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems. ANSI/AIHA Z10-2005. American National Standards Institute, Washington, DC. Christian, M.S., Bradley, J.C., Wallace, J.C., Burke, M.J., 2009. Workplace safety: a meta-analysis of the roles of person and situation factors. Journal of Applied Psychology 94, 1103–1127. Gillen, M., Baltz, D., Gassel, M., Kirsch, L., Vaccaro, D., 2002. Perceived safety climate, job demands, and coworker support among union and nonunion injured construction workers. Journal of Safety Research 33, 33–51. Glendon, I, 2008. Safety culture: snapshot of a deceloping concept. The Journal of Occupational Health and Safety—Australia and New Zealand 24 (3), 179–189. Glendon, A.I., Litherland, D.K., 2001. Safety climate factors, group differences, and safety behavior in road construction. Safety Science 39, 157–188. Griffin, M.A., Neal, A., 2000. Perceptions of safety at work: a framework for linking safety climate to safety performance, knowledge, and motivation. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology 5, 347–358. Hofmann, D.A., Morgeson, F.P., Gerras, 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. Hofmann, D.A., Stetzer, A., 1996. A cross-level investigation of factors influencing unsafe behaviors and accidents. Personnel Psychology 49 (2), 307–339. Hofmann, D.A., Stetzer, A., 1998. The role of safety climate and communication in accident interpretation: implications for learning from negative events. Academy of Management Journal 41 (6), 644–646. Huang, Y.H., Ho, M., Smith, G.S., Chen, P.Y., 2006. Safety climate and self-reported injury: assessing the mediating role of employee safety control. Accident Analysis & Prevention 38 (3), 425–433. Mueller, L.M., DaSilva, N., Townsend, J.C., Tetrick, L.E., 1999. An empirical investigation of competing safety climate measurement models. Paper Presented to the 14th Annual Meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Dallas, TX. Nahrgang, J.D., Morgeson, F.P., Hofmann, D.A., 2008. Predicting safety performance: a meta-analysis of safety and organizational constructs. Presented at the 24th Annual Conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP), San Francisco. Rosenman, K.D., Kalush, A., Reilly, M.J., Gardiner, J.C., Reeves, M., Luo, Z., 2006. How much work-related injury and illness is missed by the current national surveillance system? Journal of Occupational & Environmental Medicine 48 (4), 357–365. Shannon, H.S., Robson, L.S., Sale, J.E., 2001. Creating safer and healthier workplaces: role of organizational factors and job characteristics. American Journal of Industrial Medicine 40, 319–334. United States Department of Labor, 2009. Injuries, Illnesses and Fatalities. United States Department of Labor. Zohar, D., 1980. Safety climate in industrial organizations: theoretical and applied implications. Journal of Applied Psychology 65, 96–102. Zohar, D., 2000. A group-level model of safety climate: testing the effects of group climate on microaccidents in manufacturing jobs. Journal of Applied Psychology 85, 587–596. Zohar, D., 2002. Modifying supervisory practices to improve subunit safety: a leadership-based intervention model. Journal of Applied Psychology 87 (1), 156–163. Zohar, D., 2003. Safety climate: conceptual and measurement issues. In: Quick, J.C., Tetrick, L.E. (Eds.), Handbook of Occupational Health Psychology. American Psychological Association, Washington, DC, pp. 123–142.
Yueng-Hsiang Huang ∗ Liberty Mutual Research Institute for Safety, 71 Frankland Road, Hopkinton, MA 01748, USA Peter Y. Chen Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA James W. Grosch National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, USA ∗ Corresponding
author. Tel.: +1 508 497 0208. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (Y.-H. Huang), [email protected] (P.Y. Chen), [email protected] (J.W. Grosch) 8 December 2009
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Accident Analysis and Prevention journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/aap
Editorial note
Safety climate: New developments in conceptualization, theory, and research a r t i c l e Keyword: Safety climate
i n f o
a b s t r a c t Although the important role of safety climate in safety outcomes has been established and many studies have been done by scholars in different disciplines and across different cultures, there are still gaps in the literature. The articles in this Special Issue explore the topics of new developments in the conceptualization of safety climate and occupational/industry-focused studies of safety climate, with the goal of identifying different challenges and findings that arise within or across various occupations or industries. We are pleased to have a closing article by Dr. Dov Zohar on “Thirty Years of Safety Climate Research: Reflections and Future Directions.” © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
In 2007 there were around 4 million nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses in the U.S. which, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), occurred at a rate of 4.2 cases per 100 equivalent full-time workers. That same year there were also 5657 fatal occupational injuries (United States Department of Labor, 2009). These statistics are concerning, especially since the BLS has been shown to undercount injuries associated with chronic or acute conditions (Rosenman et al., 2006). These data illustrate the continuing need to identify ways to reduce workplace accidents and injuries and to improve overall workplace safety. Efforts to increase workplace safety encompass several areas. Standard interventions employed to reduce risk can be grouped within four broad categories: engineering (e.g., redesigning a tool or installing machine guards); administrative (e.g., changing job procedures or rotating workers through a particular job); personal protective equipment (e.g., protective glasses or hearing protection); and education and training (ANSI, 2005). Although there is general agreement that both management leadership and employee participation are critical to the success of reducing injury risk (ANSI, 2005), until recently, most intervention efforts have relied on a traditional engineering approach. In an attempt to make further improvements, risk managers and safety directors are exploring organizational and psychosocial factors in the workplace to complement other approaches. One of the most prominent factors currently under consideration is that of safety climate (Zohar, 1980; Hofmann and Stetzer, 1998; Glendon and Litherland, 2001; Shannon et al., 2001; Gillen et al., 2002). Safety climate is an organizational factor commonly cited as an important antecedent of safety in the workplace. Zohar (1980) was one of the first to introduce the concept of safety climate as a way to describe employees’ perceptions of the value and role of safety within their organizations. Specifically, safety climate refers to the workers’ perceptions of the organization’s policies, procedures, and practices as they relate to the value, importance, and actual priority of safety within the organization. The practical and theoretical 0001-4575/$ – see front matter © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.aap.2009.12.007
significance of safety climate as a construct derives from its ability to predict safety behavior and safety-related outcomes (e.g., workplace accidents and injuries) in a wide variety of settings, and across cultures (e.g., Nahrgang et al., 2008; Christian et al., 2009). Theoretically, safety climate provides a framework to guide the safety behavior of employees in such a way that they develop perceptions and expectations regarding safety behavior outcomes and, thus, behave accordingly (Zohar, 1980). In large part, workers develop these perceptions and expectations about the priority and importance of safety by observing the actions of their supervisors (Zohar, 2000). Safety climate predicts employees’ motivation to work safely, which affects employees’ safety behaviors and subsequent experiences of workplace injuries or incidents (Mueller et al., 1999; Griffin and Neal, 2000; Zohar, 2003). It has also been directly associated with increases in safety behaviors (Hofmann and Stetzer, 1996; Hofmann et al., 2003) and decreases in workplace injuries (Hofmann and Stetzer, 1996; Zohar, 2002; Huang et al., 2006). The number of studies on safety climate has increased dramatically in recent years from the first one in 1980 to a total of 130 articles published in peer-reviewed journals through 2008 (similar to the figure in Glendon (2008) on safety culture/climate, distribution of these 130 safety climate articles by year is illustrated in Fig. 1). Researchers from various countries have begun paying attention to it. This is echoed in the fact that the 33 manuscripts originally submitted to our Special Issue were generated from 17 different countries. Although the important role of safety climate in safety outcomes has been established and many studies have been done by scholars in different disciplines, there are still gaps in the literature. Our initial call for manuscripts for our Special Issue focused on three specific areas of safety climate in order to help fill the gaps and give a focus to the research. The first theme of the special issue is on the topic of new developments in the conceptualization of safety climate. Possible themes or questions to explore: what are safety climate and safety culture
1422
Editorial note / Accident Analysis and Prevention 42 (2010) 1421–1422
References
Fig. 1. Year of publication of 130 peer-reviewed journal articles on safety climate. Note: APA PsycNET search engine, which included both psychology and safety journals, was used to search for the topic “Safety Climate” in abstracts of peer-reviewed journal articles.
and how do they differ; what should safety climate dimensions encompass; how is safety climate formed or developed; how should safety climate be measured; how should safety climate scores be validated. Further, although extensive prior research has shown that safety climate predicts safety-related outcomes, relatively few studies have conducted interventions that attempts to improve safety climate. Therefore, the second topic is to provide a sampling of the most recent research being conducted on interventions to improve safety climate. Finally, in the safety climate literature, some studies have been conducted within a single organization or industry, whereas other studies have focused on workers across work settings. It is important to contrast safety climate research conducted within versus across occupations or industries. Thus, the final topic of the special issue is on occupation/industry-focused studies of safety climate, with the goal of identifying different challenges and findings that arise within or across various occupations or industries. In this special issue, we are pleased that numerous papers were submitted from various countries and we were able to identify several excellent papers on the topic. Quite a few submitted articles focused on new developments in the conceptualization of safety climate. Among the accepted articles authors explored issues with that impact on safety climate, such as organizational tenure, permanent and temporary workers, organizational trust, workforce commitment, and labor union values were explored. A multilevel study examined the role of safety climate on accident under-reporting, bringing the theory of planned behavior and a new analytical approach (dominance analysis) into the equation. Several articles addressed safety climate in different industries, such as the rail industry, the retail trade, the industrial workplace, health care, the petroleum sector, and the manufacturing sector. However, no appropriate studies were identified in terms of interventions to improve safety climate. We would like to encourage more studies on interventions which target on improving safety climate for the industries. Also important are new studies which target on the predictors of safety climate which can serve as potential factors for interventions. We would like to thank all 33 authors who submitted manuscripts and the approximately 40 expert reviewers who contributed to making this special issue come to life. A special thank you to Dr. Zohar for the closing article on “Thirty Years of Safety Climate Research: Reflections and Future Directions.”
ANSI, 2005. American National Standard for Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems. ANSI/AIHA Z10-2005. American National Standards Institute, Washington, DC. Christian, M.S., Bradley, J.C., Wallace, J.C., Burke, M.J., 2009. Workplace safety: a meta-analysis of the roles of person and situation factors. Journal of Applied Psychology 94, 1103–1127. Gillen, M., Baltz, D., Gassel, M., Kirsch, L., Vaccaro, D., 2002. Perceived safety climate, job demands, and coworker support among union and nonunion injured construction workers. Journal of Safety Research 33, 33–51. Glendon, I, 2008. Safety culture: snapshot of a deceloping concept. The Journal of Occupational Health and Safety—Australia and New Zealand 24 (3), 179–189. Glendon, A.I., Litherland, D.K., 2001. Safety climate factors, group differences, and safety behavior in road construction. Safety Science 39, 157–188. Griffin, M.A., Neal, A., 2000. Perceptions of safety at work: a framework for linking safety climate to safety performance, knowledge, and motivation. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology 5, 347–358. Hofmann, D.A., Morgeson, F.P., Gerras, 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. Hofmann, D.A., Stetzer, A., 1996. A cross-level investigation of factors influencing unsafe behaviors and accidents. Personnel Psychology 49 (2), 307–339. Hofmann, D.A., Stetzer, A., 1998. The role of safety climate and communication in accident interpretation: implications for learning from negative events. Academy of Management Journal 41 (6), 644–646. Huang, Y.H., Ho, M., Smith, G.S., Chen, P.Y., 2006. Safety climate and self-reported injury: assessing the mediating role of employee safety control. Accident Analysis & Prevention 38 (3), 425–433. Mueller, L.M., DaSilva, N., Townsend, J.C., Tetrick, L.E., 1999. An empirical investigation of competing safety climate measurement models. Paper Presented to the 14th Annual Meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Dallas, TX. Nahrgang, J.D., Morgeson, F.P., Hofmann, D.A., 2008. Predicting safety performance: a meta-analysis of safety and organizational constructs. Presented at the 24th Annual Conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP), San Francisco. Rosenman, K.D., Kalush, A., Reilly, M.J., Gardiner, J.C., Reeves, M., Luo, Z., 2006. How much work-related injury and illness is missed by the current national surveillance system? Journal of Occupational & Environmental Medicine 48 (4), 357–365. Shannon, H.S., Robson, L.S., Sale, J.E., 2001. Creating safer and healthier workplaces: role of organizational factors and job characteristics. American Journal of Industrial Medicine 40, 319–334. United States Department of Labor, 2009. Injuries, Illnesses and Fatalities. United States Department of Labor. Zohar, D., 1980. Safety climate in industrial organizations: theoretical and applied implications. Journal of Applied Psychology 65, 96–102. Zohar, D., 2000. A group-level model of safety climate: testing the effects of group climate on microaccidents in manufacturing jobs. Journal of Applied Psychology 85, 587–596. Zohar, D., 2002. Modifying supervisory practices to improve subunit safety: a leadership-based intervention model. Journal of Applied Psychology 87 (1), 156–163. Zohar, D., 2003. Safety climate: conceptual and measurement issues. In: Quick, J.C., Tetrick, L.E. (Eds.), Handbook of Occupational Health Psychology. American Psychological Association, Washington, DC, pp. 123–142.
Yueng-Hsiang Huang ∗ Liberty Mutual Research Institute for Safety, 71 Frankland Road, Hopkinton, MA 01748, USA Peter Y. Chen Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA James W. Grosch National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, USA ∗ Corresponding
author. Tel.: +1 508 497 0208. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (Y.-H. Huang), [email protected] (P.Y. Chen), [email protected] (J.W. Grosch) 8 December 2009