Despite a downward trend in accident and injury rates in the workplace, this remains an on-going issue particularly for the rail workforce. Results from the RSSB annual survey revealed 164 major injuries in 2016/17. The UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) report that the number of accidents is now beginning to show signs of reaching an ‘accident plateau’ above zero (HSE, 2016).
Safety climate is often defined as “shared perceptions with regard to safety policies, procedures and practices” (Zohar, 2011, p.143). Many research studies have examined the positive effects of safety climate on the safety performance of individuals, teams, and organizations. These studies have frequently revealed positive relationships between safety climate and the reduction of negative events (Clarke, 2006; Zohar, 2008).
Although previous research has explored the relationship between safety climate and safety behaviour, suggesting that safety climate can predict safety performance, the validity of specific safety climate tools has not been tested for UK rail workers and design engineers. In addition, there remains an opportunity to study the relationship between identified safety climate factors and related constructs in this specific industry.
The aims of the present paper are to explore the construct validity of the multilevel safety climate tool developed by Zohar and Luria’s Safety Climate questionnaire in a design engineer sample. Their original questionnaire is composed of two distinct 16-item scales, which assess different components of safety climate at the managerial and team supervision level of analysis. After verifying the questionnaire factor structure, we explored its relationship with other relevant constructs (production pressure, mood and consideration of future safety consequences) known as nomological network analysis.
In order to achieve our goals, we conducted a questionnaire research study that included Zohar and Luria’s safety climate tool and additional tools measuring production pressure, mood and consideration of future safety consequences. The research involved a sample of operational rail infrastructure workers and design engineers.
A preliminary study by Curcuruto, Morgan, Kandola & Griffin (under review) previously tested the internal factor structure of Zohar and Luria’s (2005) safety climate tool in a sample operational rail workers and found a single factor structure at managerial level and two distinct factor structures at supervision level we describe as ‘supervision monitoring’ and ‘supervision communication‘. This study is an extension of this work and further tests the construct validity in an additional sample of design engineers. In order to contribute to the construct validation we tested the correlation of the emerged safety climate factors with production pressure, mood and consideration of future safety consequences, in samples of design engineers and operational rail workers. The findings are further described in the final paper.
Overall, our results confirm the three factors identified by Curcuruto et al. (under review) and reveal associations of these factors between production pressure, mood and consideration of future safety consequences in both design engineers and operational rail workers.
Note: Paper to be considered for special edition of Applied Ergonomics
