Safety climate from the safety experts: In their own words
Conference Paper
Overview
Overview
abstract
Researchers define safety climate as shared employee perceptions of the policies, practices, and procedures concerning safety (Zohar, 2000) and have demonstrated how these perceptions relate to various safety-related outcomes (e.g., Barling, Loughlin, & Kelloway, 2002; Clarke, 2006; Hofmann & Stetzer 1996). In an effort to further understand the meaning of safety climate, we surveyed 62 safety experts about their experiences and asked them to respond to a series of questions in their own words. Some of the questions included: (a) How do you know when you are in a safe or unsafe work environment?; (b) What features or characteristics of a workplace (general observations about the workplace) indicate it is a safe or unsafe place to work?; (c) What do managers do to ensure a good safety climate is maintained (does not go away)?; (d) What do managers do that jeopardizes the safety climate?; (e) In what ways do contractors have a positive and/or negative influence on the safety climate of an organization?; and, (f) In a merger, acquisition, or divestiture, what are some effective and ineffective ways that you have observed organizations communicate their safety climate to the employees? We also asked them to share critical incidents involving how a company effectively or ineffectively dealt with a near miss as well managed safety climate across different locations, businesses, and/or nations. We summarize these responses and highlight consistencies and inconsistencies across respondents as well as in comparison to the research literature.
