The Relationship Between Safety Attitudes and Occupational Accidents
This research provides empirical evidence on the relationships between employee attitudes to safety issues and accident indicators in a Spanish context. The research attempts to review to what degree those attitudes reflect a collective, or shared, climate for safety within a number of organizations. Data were gathered from workers in a number of industries in Valencia (Spain) by questionnaire. A total of 1,234 valid questionnaires were completed and formed the basis for subsequent analysis. Analysis of the attitude dimensions found a similar structure to that found in previous research in other countries, as well as identifying those dimensions shared within groups, more likely to represe…
Multilevel Models in the Explanation of the Relationship between Safety Climate and Safe Behavior
AbstractThis study examines the relationships between components of organizational safety climate, including employee attitudes to organizational safety issues; perceptions of the physical working environment, and evaluations of worker engagement with safety issues; and relates these to self-reported levels of safety behavior. It attempts to explore the relationships between these variables in 1189 workers across 78 work groups in a large transportation organization. Evaluations of safety climate, the working environment and worker engagement, as well as safe behaviors, were collected using a self report questionnaire. The multilevel analysis showed that both levels of evaluation (the work …
The effects of organizational and individual factors on occupational accidents
This study examined the relationships between individual psychological, work environment and organizational variables and occupational accidents using structural equation modelling with latent variables. A series of nested explicative models of the relationships between these variables was derived. Data were collected from a wide range of industrial sectors in the Valencia region of Spain using structured interviews. In total, 525 valid questionnaires were completed and these formed the basis for the subsequent analyses. Analysis showed that the model in the series that proposed relationships between all the latent variables provided the best representation of the data. This supported the b…
Modelling Employee Attitudes to Safety
This paper describes the modeling of employee attitudes to safety in three industrial sectors operating in the UK. Gauging employee attitudes to safety has become an increasingly important method of appraising human factors issues in many organizations. This study is based on data collected from a large survey (n = 2429) of employee attitudes to safety. It attempts to describe the subjective architectures, or explicative model, of employee attitudes to safety in these sectors by relating these attitudes to their appraisals of commitment to safety in their organization. A comparison of models across sector models is also made. The data support the claim that the architecture of attitudes to…
Safety Culture: The Prediction of Commitment to Safety in the Manufacturing Industry
This paper reports one aspect of a large-scale study of safety culture in 13 companies operating in the manufacturing sector in the UK. The study is based on data collected from three different domains of measurement relevant to the description of safety culture: workplace assessments, a survey of employee attitudes to safety – including questionnaire and interview data – and company accident records. The data described in this paper concern the prediction of perceived commitment to safety from employees' attitudes to safety as reported in a self-administered questionnaire. Commitment to safety was used as a marker of the strength of the organization's safety culture. The data showed that e…
The architecture of employee attitudes to safety in the manufacturing sector
This study examines the relationships between components of organisational safety climate, including: employee attitudes to organisational and individual safety issues; perceptions of the physical work environment and perceptions of workplace hazards; and relates these to self‐reported levels of safety activity. It also attempts to replicate the explicative model derived by Cheyne et al. in a similar study within the manufacturing sector. Data were collected from a large manufacturing organisation using a questionnaire. A total of 708 valid questionnaires were returned and formed the basis for the subsequent analyses. These data showed that a common structure of attitudes to safety issues a…
Modelling safety climate in the prediction of levels of safety activity
Abstract This study examined the architecture of the relationships between components of organizational safety climate, including employee attitudes to safety issues and perceptions of the work environment, and related this to self-reported levels of safety activity. Data were collected from a large multinational manufacturing organization by questionnaire. A total of 915 valid questionnaires were returned and formed the basis for structural equation modelling and subsequent analyses. These data showed that a common structure, or architecture, of attitudes to safety issues and perceptions of the work environment could be constructed that explained levels of safety activity. The strength of …