Citation

Hutchinson DM, Andel SA, Spector PE. Int. J. Occup. Environ. Health 2018; 24(1-2): 38-46.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology , University of South Florida , Tampa , USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Maney Pub.)

DOI

10.1080/10773525.2018.1507867

PMID

30156139

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.

Language: en

Keywords

Organizational climate; civility climate; safety climate; violence prevention climate; workplace accidents; workplace mistreatment