About Safety climate

Safety climate is a term commonly used to describe the sum of employees’ perceptions regarding overall safety within their organization. Much debate still continues over the definition and application of safety climate as the term is still used interchangeable with safety culture. This article will discuss various aspects of safety climate including its origin, various definitions, empirical development, common measurement methods and it’s validity and predictive value.

Introduction

As part of managing health and safety, organizations should strive to create a culture that shares a common goal towards safety (Cooper 2001). Clarke (2003) notes that the UK Health and Safety Commission recommends that companies develop a “positive safety culture” in order to prevent workplace accidents. A “good” or “positive” safety culture should therefore reflect a shared understanding amongst employees that ‘safety is the number one priority’. In order to develop a positive safety culture, it is important to be aware of the current state of an organization’s health and safety performance in order to properly address the organizations’ health and safety issues (Clarke, 1999). Traditionally, ‘lagging indicators’ are used to identify trends in accidents that are occurring within the workplace. Lagging indicators may include the number of lost time injuries, time and place of accident, type of injury, etc. However, in recent years there has been increasing evidence to suggest that more attention should be focussed on ‘leading indicators’, measures that precede or predict safety outcomes and indicate the impact of human, organizational and managerial factors on safety performance. It is no longer sufficient to be collecting information on injuries or failures that have occurred in the workplace; there needs to be a proactive approach to safety which requires reliable ‘leading indicators’ that can provide information before risks materialise into accidents.

Organizational Climate and Organizational Culture

In order to understand safety climate and safety culture, it is appropriate to examine the usage and meaning of organisational culture and climate. Similar to safety climate and safety culture organizational climate and organizational culture have two very distinct origins. Schein (1988) states “In the 1950's and 60's, the field of organizational psychology began to differentiate itself out of industrial psychology” (p. 2). This move allowed the field of organizational psychology to draw influences and concept ideas from sociology (the study of social problems) and anthropology (the comparative study of human societies and cultures and their development) (Schein 1988). Organizational Culture then gained significant attention during the 1980’s in organizational psychology, organizational behaviour and management literature. On the other hand, Yule (2003) believes that organizational climate originated out of social and behavioural psychology in the 1950’s and 1960’s (Yule, 2003).

Culture vs. Climate

Although there seem to be some similarities in the definitions of safety culture and safety climate, safety culture is generally seen to exist at a deeper level than safety climate (Neal and Griffin 2002; Seo et al., 2004; Schein 1992). Guldenmund (2000) suggests that safety climate refers to the attitudes towards safety within an organization while safety culture is concerned with the underlying beliefs and prevailing values of the work group. Glendon, Clarke and McKenna (2006) describe safety culture as “the fundamental underlying beliefs and values of a group of people in relation to risk and safety” (p. 363). A common explanation describes culture as simply as “the way we do things around here” (CBI, 1990).

Defining Safety Climate

Generally the concept of safety climate is used to describe the general perceptions of, and attitudes towards how safety is managed in the workplace. As a concept, safety climate is seen to show the surface features of safety culture (Guldenmund 2000; Flin et al., 2000) and although the safety climate of an organization may change on a daily basis, the underlying beliefs, values and behavioural norms will remain largely unchanged.

Empirical Development of Safety Climate

Measuring safety climate is still relatively new when compared with the concepts of social and work climate (Yule, 2003). Previous to Zohar’s (1980) study of the Israeli manufacturing sector, the assessment of an organizations culture had never been specifically focused on assessing the attitudes of employees in relation to safety. Since then, there have been a number of studies and research teams that have aimed at developing a reliable measure of safety climate. As the concept has received more recognition and importance, there has been a growing increase in the number of safety climate measures; however, most of the focus has been on “refining question sets in order to improve face-validity” (Yule, 2003). Yule (2003) highlights that instead of focusing on the construct or predictive value of surveys, some researchers have been getting carried away with “factor analyses and internal consistency checks”. He goes on to highlight that the research field needs to address issues of ‘constructive and predictive validity’ in order to progress the level of research past its developmental stages.