Perceptions of safety climate at different employment levels

The notion of safety climate has become central to contemporary theories of occupational health and safety management. Studies of safety climate, focusing on attitudes and perceptions, have suggested that there are variations in both the architecture and intensity of employee attitudes to safety depending on employment level. This paper explores the nature of such differences. The study described here involved the comparison of data, gathered using a self-administered survey instrument, on employee attitudes to safety across three levels (managers, supervisors and general employees). A total of 967 general employees, 123 first-line super-visors and 97 managers from two large manufacturing organizations took part in the study. The data were compared in three ways. First, the factor structure of attitudes in each group was examined, then possible differences between factor scores were investigated and finally the structural relationships between climate factors were compared across groups. Multisample confirmatory factor analysis showed that the factor structures were very similar across the groups. In terms of the relationships between the factors, however, the architectures illustrated quite different structures. This, taken with the range of differences in the intensity of attitudes and perceptions, suggested that, while managers, supervisors and general employees shared the same definition of safety factors, their perceptions of these factors and how they inter-related proved to be quite different. Implications of the results are discussed in terms of promoting a positive culture for safety.