Abstract:

Workplace safety is a crucial issue in high-risk industries around the world. Statistics show that with the improvement of engineering and technical reliability, more than two-thirds of accidents are at least partly caused by human factors. Unsafe behavior is the trigger of system failure, and the latent situational factors are the “resident pathogens”. Therefore, improving the situational factors is one of the effective ways to promote safety performance. Safety climate, which is defined as the employee shared perceptions with regard to safety policies, procedures, and practices in the organization, is well-documented as a robust predictor of safety behavior and safety outcomes. The effect size of safety climate on safety performance (e.g., safety behavior, accidents, and injuries) exceeds that of all other identified safety risk indicators. Nevertheless, its intervention study is relatively limited. Focusing on the core dimension of safety climate: management commitment to safety, we propose that direct safety management actions are an important way to reflect supervisors’/managers’ commitment to safety. Based on this, the current research has three aims: (1) examining the impact of supervisors’ and managers’ critical safety management actions on the group and organizational safety climate, respectively; (2) examining the impact of the supervisor-targeted intervention on group safety climate promotion by improving supervisors’ direct safety management action; (3) examining the impact of the manager-targeted intervention on organizational and group safety climate promotion by improving managers’ direct safety management action. We designed three studies to explore the questions above mentioned. Study 1 is a time-lagged survey to explore the impact of supervisors’ and managers’ critical direct safety management actions on group safety climate and organizational safety climate, respectively. As for supervisors, we supposed there are two critical direct safety management actions to influence their employees’ safety climate perception: supporting and guidance, involving workers. As for managers, the critical direct safety management actions could be managerial participation and communication. Additionally, given the importance of supervisors in cultivating group safety climate, at the group level, we developed a quasi-experiment study (Study 2) to enhance the group safety climate by improving the critical direct safety management actions of the supervisors. Furthermore, a quasi-experiment (Study 3) was designed to promote both group and organizational safety climate by improving critical direct safety management actions of the managers. We plan to adopt an intervention technique named Safety Management By Walking Around (SMBWA), which was found to be positively associated with the patient safety climate in the healthcare industry. The contributions of the current research are as follows. First, signaling theory is introduced into the theoretical framework of safety climate formation. It’s proposed that the managerial staff’s direct safety management action is a highly observable signal, which can convey their commitment to safety. As an important information source of employees’ perception of safety climate, managerial staff’s direct safety management action could be an effective strategy for safety climate promotion. The application of signaling theory can provide theoretical support for the research on the formation and change of safety climate. Second, we adopt a multi-level perspective to simultaneously explore the effect of the critical direct safety management actions of both supervisors and managers on the corresponding level of safety climate, highlighting the role of supervisors’ and managers’ critical direct safety management actions in enhancing the group and organizational safety climate. In addition, the current research sheds light on the impact of the manager-targeted safety climate intervention strategy on safety climate improvement at both group and organizational levels. The research results are expected to be applied in safety management practice.

Key words: organizational safety climate, group safety climate, safety management actions, management commitment to safety