Digging deeper into the shared variance among safety-related climates: the need for a general safety climate measure

• Published in: International journal of occupational and environmental health Vol. 24; no. 1-2; pp. 38 - 46
• Main Authors: Hutchinson, Derek M., Andel, Stephanie A., Spector, Paul E.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Taylor & Francis 01.01.2018; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Aggression; civility climate; Climate; Environmental assessment; Factor analysis; Female; Humans; Incivility; Male; Middle Aged; Occupational hazards; Occupational safety; Organizational climate; Organizational Culture; Risk factors; Safety; safety climate; Safety Management - organization & administration; Surveys and Questionnaires; Violence; violence prevention climate; workplace accidents; workplace mistreatment; Workplace Violence; Young Adult; workplace accidents; workplace mistreatment; safety climate; Organizational climate; civility climate; violence prevention climate
• ISSN: 1077-3525; 2049-3967
• DOI: 10.1080/10773525.2018.1507867

We combined three independent streams of workplace climate research, safety, violence prevention, and civility, to devise a general safety climate scale that explicitly addressed a variety of risks. A confirmatory factor analysis suggested that a higher-order factor may be responsible for the similarity in relationships across these safety-related climate measures with exposure to organizational hazards and resulting employee outcomes. As a result, a concise 10-item measure was developed and validated to assess a possible general safety climate factor. Further analyses suggested that the use of a general safety climate measure did not attenuate the relationships with workplace hazards and employee outcomes. Although different safety-related climate variables may be theoretically distinct, there may not be a measurable benefit in promoting one form of climate over others. Future studies should consider employing the general safety climate measure in place of domain-specific climate measures, unless the domain-specific climate is solely of interest.