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

Digging deeper into the shared variance among safety-related climates: the need for a general safety climate measure. Int J Occup Environ Health. 2018 Aug 29;:1-9 Authors: Hutchinson DM, Andel SA, Spector PE Abstract 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. PMID: 30156139 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health - Category: Environmental Health Tags: Int J Occup Environ Health Source Type: research