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Analysis of a Safety Climate Measure for Occupational Vehicle Drivers and Implications for Safer Workplaces

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2012

Andrew R. Wills ,
Herbert C. Biggs  and
Barry Watson
Andrew R. Wills*
Affiliation:
Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Herbert C. Biggs
Affiliation:
Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Barry Watson
Affiliation:
Queensland University of Technology, Australia
*
Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety — Queensland, School of Psychology and Counselling, QUT, Beams Rd, Carseidine, Qtd 4034, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Safety climate, defined as workers' shared perceptions about the importance of safety to their organisation, has received increasing attention as a construct that is useful for benchmarking organisational safety and as a way of measuring the socio-organisational antecedents of safety performance. Few studies have utilised pre-existing safety climate measures and as a result of this, there is limited information about the generalisability of the construct and its underlying dimensions across organisations and industries. This is an important step towards establishing safety climate as a generic organisational construct which can be reliably measured. In those few cases where studies have used existing measures, results indicate inconsistencies in the underlying factor structures. Accordingly, using a sample of 321 employees from three separate organisations and industries, this study examined the factor structure of a modified version of an existing measure (the Safety Climate Questionnaire [SCQ]). Principal components factor analysis revealed that the original factor structure was upheld by the current sample (with the exception of two factors collapsing into one). This provides support for the generic nature of safety climate as it is operationalised by the SCQ. Additional items were included and emerged as two dimensions, providing support for the generalisability of these new factors across the organisations and industries employed. The results are of theoretical and practical significance as they provide evidence for the generic structure of the construct across organisations and industries, and exemplify how a measure of safety climate could be usefully employed in disability management planning and early intervention strategies.

Type
Articles
Information
The Australian Journal of Rehabilitation Counselling , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , January 2005 , pp. 8 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2005

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