Leading and lagging: Process safety climate–incident relationships at one year

In order to evaluate the leading and lagging effects of process safety climate on incidents, we correlated safety climate survey data with organizational safety records from before and after the survey time period. We obtained data from a large, multinational organization with manufacturing operations involving a number of complex processes, chemicals, and hazardous substances. A total of 7728 employees from 62 sites responded to a safety climate survey in 2007. Individual responses were aggregated to the site-level and matched to site-level organizational records of process safety incidents 1 year before and 1 year after survey administration. Employees’ perceptions of good routine housekeeping were significantly related to environmental impact incidents as both a leading and a lagging indicator, as well as fires/explosions and property damage outcomes. Employees’ perceptions of systems to prevent backlogs and the extent to which health and safety problems are promptly corrected were also related to environmental releases and fires/explosions. Implications for process safety climate research, organizational survey strategies, and organizational climate change are discussed.     

Modeling attitudes and perceptions as predictors for changing safety margins during organizational change

This study describes the relations between different dimensions of leadership commitment, safety climate and attitudes toward change, and how these affect employee perceptions of safety during organizational change in a high risk environment. We collected data from a European national air navigation services provider during a volatile 3-year corporatization process that ended in the sudden collapse of a deliberate change implementation project. Surprisingly, despite visible signs of internal and external stress caused by the volatile and disruptive change process, we did not observe any change in the traditional safety metrics of incident and accident reporting during the study. The study is based on a large survey (n = 422) of individual attitudes and perceptions of safety climate, perception of leadership commitment to safety, attitudes to organizational change, and perception of safety. The data support the claim that perception of safety at least, in part, depends on individual perceptions of the leadership’s commitment to safety, and the safety climate in place at a given point in time. The model shows how employee perceptions of the leadership’s commitment to safety and safety climate are related to both attitudes toward change, and to perceived safety.     

Occupational injury in America: An analysis of risk factors using data from the General Social Survey (GSS)

IntroductionAlthough much is known about the distribution of occupational injury in terms of various job and employment factors, considerably less is known about other possible risk factors, particularly those involving psychosocial and organizational factors. These factors have not been emphasized in most injury surveillance systems or large scale, population based surveys.MethodIn this study, data from the 2002 General Social Survey (GSS) and NIOSH Quality of Work Life (QWL) module were used to examine the risk of occupational injury in terms of socio-demographic factors, employment characteristics, and organizational factors.ResultsThe most informative results were obtained from Poisson regression analyses, which identified race, occupational category, and work-family interference as risk factors, and safety climate and organizational effectiveness as protective factors for occupational injury. These results provide guidance for targeting interventions and protective measures to curtail occupational injury in the United States.     

Does safety climate moderate the influence of staffing adequacy and work conditions on nurse injuries?

PROBLEM: Hospital nurses have one of the highest work-related injury rates in the United States. Yet, approaches to improving employee safety have generally focused on attempts to modify individual behavior through enforced compliance with safety rules and mandatory participation in safety training. We examined a theoretical model that investigated the impact on nurse injuries (back injuries and needlesticks) of critical structural variables (staffing adequacy, work engagement, and work conditions) and further tested whether safety climate moderated these effects. METHOD: A longitudinal, non-experimental, organizational study, conducted in 281 medical-surgical units in 143 general acute care hospitals in the United States. RESULTS: Work engagement and work conditions were positively related to safety climate, but not directly to nurse back injuries or needlesticks. Safety climate moderated the relationship between work engagement and needlesticks, while safety climate moderated the effect of work conditions on both needlesticks and back injuries, although in unexpected ways. DISCUSSION AND IMPACT ON INDUSTRY: Our findings suggest that positive work engagement and work conditions contribute to enhanced safety climate and can reduce nurse injuries.     

Occupational injury rates among Norwegian farmers: A sociotechnical perspective

Introduction: This study addressed relative injury risk among Norwegian farmers, who are mostly self-employed and run small farm enterprises. The aim was to explore the relative importance of individual, enterprise, and work environment risks for occupational injury and to discuss the latent conditions for injuries using sociotechnical system theory. Method: Injury report and risk factors were collected through a survey among Norwegian farm owners in November 2012. The response rate was 40% (n = 2,967). Annual work hours were used to calculate injury rates within groups. Poisson regression using the log of hours worked as the offset variable allowed for the modeling of adjusted rate ratios for variables predictive of injury risk. Finally, safety climate measures were introduced to assess potential moderating effects on risk. Results: Results showed that the most important risk factors for injuries were the design of the workplace, type of production, and off-farm work hours. The main results remained unchanged when adding safety climate measures, but the measures moderated the injury risk for categories of predominant production and increased the risk for farmers working with family members and/or employees. An overall finding is how the risk factors were interrelated. Conclusions: The study identified large structural diversities within and between groups of farmers. The study drew attention to operating conditions rather than individual characteristics. The farmer’s role (managerial responsibility) versus regulation and safety climate is important for discussions of injury risk. Practical Applications: We need to study sub-groups to understand how regulation and structural changes affect work conditions and management within different work systems, conditioned by production. It is important to encourage actors in the political-economic system to become involved in issues that were found to affect the safety of farmers.     

Values-in-action that support safe production

Introduction: Safe production is a sustainable approach to managing an organization’s operations that considers the interests of both management and workers as salient stakeholders in a productive and safe workplace. A supportive culture enacts values versus only espousing them. These values-in-action are beliefs shared by both management and workers that align what should happen in performing organizational routines to be safe and be productive with what actually is done. However, the operations and safety management literature provides little guidance on which values-in-action are most important to safe production and how they work together to create a supportive culture. Method: The researchers conducted exploratory case studies in 10 manufacturing plants of 9 firms. The researchers compared plant managers’ top-down perspectives on safety in the performance of work and workers’ bottom-up experiences of the safety climate and their rates of injury on the job. Each case study used data collected from interviewing multiple managers, the administration of a climate survey to workers and the examination of the plant’s injury rates over time as reported to its third party health and safety insurer. Results: The researchers found that plants with four values-in-action —a commitment to safety, discipline, prevention and participation—were capable of safe production, while plants without those values were neither safe nor productive. Where culture and climate aligned lower rates of injury were experienced. Discussion and conclusion: The four value-in-actions must all be present and work together in a self-reinforcing manner to engage workers and managers in achieving safe production. Practical application: Managers of both operations and safety functions do impact safety outcomes such as reducing injuries by creating a participatory environment that encourage learning that improves both safety and production routines.     

The impact of organizational climate on safety climate and individual behavior

Relatively little previous research has investigated the meechanisms by which safety climate affects safety behavior. The current study examined the effects of general organizational climate on safety climate and safety performance. As expected, general organizational climate exerted a significant impact on safety climate, and safety climate in turn was related to self-reports of compliance with safety regulations and procedures as well as participation in safety-related activities within the workplace. The effect of general organizational climate on safety performance was mediated by safety climate, while the effect of safety climate on safety performance was partially mediated by safety knowledge and motivation.     

Incorporating organizational factors into probabilistic risk assessment of complex socio-technical systems: Principles and theoretical foundations

The current generation of Probabilistic Risk Analysis (PRA), particularly those for technical systems, does not include an explicit representation of the possible impacts of organization and management on the safety performance of equipment and personnel. There are a number of technical challenges in developing a predictive model of organizational safety performance. There is a need for a widely accepted and theoretically sound set of principles on which models of organizational influences could be developed and validated. As a result of a multidisciplinary effort, this paper explores the feasibility of developing such principles and proposes a set of principles for organizational safety risk analysis. Then, as a realization of the proposed modeling principles, a safety risk framework, named Socio-Technical Risk Analysis (SoTeRiA), is developed. SoTeRiA formally integrates the technical system risk models with the social (safety culture and safety climate) and structural (safety practices) aspects of safety prediction models, and provides a theoretical basis for the integration. A systematic view of safety culture and safety climate leaves an important gap in modeling complex system safety risk, and SoTeRiA, describing the relationship between these two concepts, bridges this gap. The framework explicitly recognizes the relationship among constructs at multiple levels of analysis, and extends the PRA framework to include the effects of organizational factors in a more comprehensive and defensible way.     

Exposure to fall hazards and safety climate in the aircraft maintenance industry

PROBLEM: Falls represent a significant occupational hazard, particularly in industries with dynamic work environments. This paper describes rates of noncompliance with fall hazard prevention requirements, perceived safety climate and worker knowledge and beliefs, and the association between fall exposure and safety climate measures in commercial aircraft maintenance activities. METHODS: Walkthrough observations were conducted on aircraft mechanics at two participating facilities (Sites A and B) to ascertain the degree of noncompliance. Mechanics at each site completed questionnaires concerning fall hazard knowledge, personal safety beliefs, and safety climate. Questionnaire results were summarized into safety climate and belief scores by workgroup and site. Noncompliance rates observed during walkthroughs were compared to the climate-belief scores, and were expected to be inversely associated. RESULTS: Important differences were seen in fall safety performance between the sites. The study provided a characterization of aircraft maintenance fall hazards, and also demonstrated the effectiveness of an objective hazard assessment methodology. Noncompliance varied by height, equipment used, location of work on the aircraft, shift, and by safety system. DISCUSSION: Although the expected relationship between safety climate and noncompliance was seen for site-average climate scores, workgroups with higher safety climate scores had greater observed noncompliance within Site A. Overall, use of engineered safety systems had a significant impact on working safely, while safety beliefs and climate also contributed, though inconsistently. IMPACT ON INDUSTRY: The results of this study indicate that safety systems are very important in reducing noncompliance with fall protection requirements in aircraft maintenance facilities. Site-level fall safety compliance was found to be related to safety climate, although an unexpected relationship between compliance and safety climate was seen at the workgroup level within site. Finally, observed fall safety compliance was found to differ from self-reported compliance.     

Human resource management practices and organizational injury rates

Introduction: This study investigated the extent to which five human resource management (HRM) practices—systematic selection, extensive training, performance appraisal, high relative compensation, and empowerment—simultaneously predicted later organizational-level injury rates. Methods: Specifically, the association between these HRM practices (assessed via on-site audits by independent observers) with organizational injury rates collected by a national regulatory agency one and two years later were modeled. Results: Results from 49 single-site UK organizations indicated that, after controlling for industry-level risk, organization size, and the other four HRM practices, only empowerment predicted lower subsequent organizational-level injury rates. Practical Applications: Findings from the current study have important implications for the design of HRM systems and for organizational-level policies and practices associated with better employee safety.     

Safety climate differences among job positions in a nuclear decommissioning and demolition industry: Employees’ self-reported safety attitudes and perceptions

This study examined group differences in safety climate among job positions in a nuclear decommissioning and demolition industry in the United States. Safety climate surveys were conducted at 10 locations. Survey responses totaled 1587 out of an available population of 3296 workers for an overall response rate of 48.1%. Significant differences (p < 0.05) in mean safety climate scores, factor scores, and item scores among job positions were observed. Most notably, foremen’s self-reported safety attitudes and perceptions indicate a lower safety climate and suggest the need to target safety improvements at this key organizational level.     

Work-safety tension, perceived risk, and worker injuries: a meso-mediational model

IntroductionWork-safety tension arises when workers perceive that working safely is at odds with effectively doing their jobs. We proposed that workers’ perceptions of work-safety tension would be associated with higher levels of perceived risk, which would, in turn, relate to worker injuries on the job.MethodGrocery store workers (n = 600) completed an online survey and organizational worker injury reports were obtained for a two-year period following the survey. Survey results were linked to subsequent worker injuries using hierarchical generalized linear modeling.ResultsWe found support for the proposed meso-mediation model: department work-safety tension predicted subsequent worker injuries, partially through an association with workers’ risk perceptions.ConclusionsSafety researchers and consultants and organizational leaders should look beyond typically-examined safety climate constructs, such as management commitment to safety, and pay particular attention to workers’ perceptions of work-safety tension.     

Workplace safety perceptions and perceived organizational support: do supportive perceptions influence safety perceptions?

The current study investigated the relationship between organizational safety climate and perceived organizational support. Additionally, it examined the relationship with job satisfaction, worker compliance with safety management policies, and accident frequency. Safety climate and supportive perceptions were assessed with Hayes, Perander, Smecko, et al. 's (1998) and Eisenberger, Fasolo and LaMastro's (1990) scales respectively. Confirmatory factors analysis confirmed the 5-factor structure of Hayes et al. 's WSS scale. Regression analysis and t-tests indicated that workers with positive perspectives regarding supportive perceptions similarly expressed positive perceptions concerning workplace safety. Furthermore, they expressed greater job satisfaction, were more compliant with safety management policies, and registered lower accident rates. The perceived level of support in an organization is apparently closely associated with workplace safety perception and other organizational and social factors which are important for safety. The results are discussed in light of escalating interest in how organizational factors affect employee safety and supportive perceptions.     

Measuring mining safety with injury statistics: lost workdays as indicators of risk

PROBLEM: Mining in the United States remains one of the most hazardous industries, despite significant reductions in fatal injury rates over the last century. Coal mine fatality rates, for example, have dropped almost a thousand-fold since their peak in 1908. While incidence rates are very important indicators, lost worktime measures offer an alternative metric for evaluating job safety and health performance. The first objective of this study examined the distributions and summary statistics of all injuries reported to the Mine Safety and Health Administration from 1983 through 2004. Over the period studied (1983-2004), there were 31,515,368 lost workdays associated with mining injuries, for an equivalent of 5,700 person-years lost annually. The second objective addressed the problem of comparing safety program performance in mines for situations where denominator data were lacking. By examining the consequences of injuries, comparisons can be made between disparate operations without the need for denominators. Total risk in the form of lost workday sums can help to distinguish between lower- and higher-risk operations or time periods. METHOD: Our method was to use a beta distribution to model the losses and to compare underground coal mining to underground metal/nonmetal mining from 2000 to 2004. RESULTS: Our results showed the probability of an injury having 10 or more lost workdays was 0.52 for coal mine cases versus 0.35 for metal/nonmetal mine cases. In addition, a comparison of injuries involving continuous mining machines over 2001-2002 versus 2003-2004 showed that the ratio of average losses in the later period to those in the earlier period was approximately 1.08, suggesting increasing risks for such operations. DISCUSSION: This denominator-free safety measure will help the mining industry more effectively identify higher-risk operations and more realistically evaluate their safety improvement programs. IMPACT ON INDUSTRY: Attention to a variety of metrics concerning the performance of a job safety and health program will enhance industry's ability to manage these programs and reduce risk.     

Creating safer workplaces: assessing the determinants and role of safety climate

PROBLEM: Although there has been considerable interest in safety climate, relatively little attention has been given to the factors that determine safety climate or to testing the hypothesized mediating role of safety climate with respect to safety-related outcomes. METHOD: Questionnaire responses were obtained from 2,208 employees of a large national retail chain in 21 different locations. RESULTS: After controlling for demographic variables, three factors: environmental conditions, safety-related policies and programs, and general organizational climate, accounted for 55% of the variance in perceived safety climate. Interestingly, organizational climate made a significant contribution to safety climate, even after controlling for the other more safety-relevant variables. Partial correlations showed that safety policies and programs had the largest observed correlation with safety climate, followed by two of the dimensions of organizational climate (communication and organizational support). Using Baron and Kenny's (J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 51 (1986) 1173) procedures, the principal effects of the various work situation factors on perceived safety at work were found to be direct rather than mediated by safety climate. Safety climate influenced perceived safety at work, but its role as a mediator was limited. IMPACT ON INDUSTRY: These results are discussed in terms of other recent findings on safety climate and the growing interest in understanding management and organizational factors in the context of workplace safety.     

Designing a composite indicator for road safety

This study set out to develop a composite road safety indicator for benchmarking countries’ road safety performance, which would combine the main layers of the road safety pyramid which describes the complex nature of road safety activities, performance and outcomes. Four groups of basic safety indicators were considered, which refer to: policy performance (road safety programmes), final road safety outcomes (fatality rates, scope of traffic injury), intermediate outcomes (wearing rates of seat belts, crashworthiness and composition of vehicle fleet, alcohol-impaired driving), and background characteristics of countries (motorization level, population density). The analysis used the data collected for 27 European countries. Weights based on statistical models were used to combine the basic indicators into a composite one. Principal Component Analysis and Common Factor Analysis weighting were examined. The composite indicators, estimated by several methods, enabled us to rank and group the countries according to their safety performance.The analysis revealed that the countries’ ranking based on the composite indicators is not necessarily similar to the traditional ranking of countries based on fatality rates only. Furthermore, it was observed that the indicators belonging to the final outcomes and intermediate outcomes are not uniform in their behaviour. Indicators which were found to be more consistent and influential and termed a ‘core set of basic indicators’ are recommended for future uses. The general conclusion is that the design of a composite road safety indicator in which relevant information from the different components of the road safety pyramid has been captured and weighted is realistic and meaningful. Such an indicator gives a more enriched picture of road safety than a ranking based only on fatality rates, which is the common practice at present. Grouping countries in this process is promising and seems to be preferable to simply ranking countries.     

基于SPSS聚类分析的企业职业伤害风险分级标准研究

对不同行业和不同规模的221家企业基础数据的调研分析，借助sPSS的聚类分析功能，对企业职业伤害风险分级进行研究，通过综合分析认为将企业职业伤害风险分为4类较为合理，并给出了企业职业伤害风险分级建议标准。根据该标准对在广西壮族自治区A市和辽宁省B市调研获取的661家企业职业伤害风险进行分级分析，从而验证分级标准的合理性和可行性。     

Making work safer: Testing a model of social exchange and safety management

Introduction

This study tests a conceptual model that focuses on social exchange in the context of safety management. The model hypothesizes that supportive safety policies and programs should impact both safety climate and organizational commitment. Further, perceived organizational support is predicted to partially mediate both of these relationships.

Methods

Study outcomes included traditional outcomes for both organizational commitment (e.g., withdrawal behaviors) as well as safety climate (e.g., self-reported work accidents). Questionnaire responses were obtained from 1,723 employees of a large national retailer.

Results

Using structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques, all of the model's hypothesized relationships were statistically significant and in the expected directions. The results are discussed in terms of social exchange in organizations and research on safety climate.

Impact on Industry

Maximizing safety is a social-technical enterprise. Expectations related to social exchange and reciprocity figure prominently in creating a positive climate for safety within the organization.     

Railway safety climate: a study on organizational development

The safety climate of an organization is considered a leading indicator of potential risk for railway organizations. This study adopts the perceptual measurement–individual attribute approach to investigate the safety climate of a railway organization. The railway safety climate attributes are evaluated from the perspective of railway system staff. We identify four safety climate dimensions from exploratory factor analysis, namely safety communication, safety training, safety management and subjectively evaluated safety performance. Analytical results indicate that the safety climate differs at vertical and horizontal organizational levels. This study contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidence of the multilevel safety climate in a railway organization, presents possible causes of the differences under various cultural contexts and differentiates between safety climate scales for diverse workgroups within the railway organization. This information can be used to improve the safety sustainability of railway organizations and to conduct safety supervisions for the government.