Riesgos de seguridad

As noted above, the role of organisational climate in determining how employees perceive and respond to their work environment is well established, however, researchers have argued that climate perceptions should focus on a specific referent. Since then, “climate for

something” has been prominent in the climate literature, for example: service climate (Schneider et al., 2000) and safety climate (Zohar, 1980). In particular, safety climate has been argued to be one of the contributors to the climate in organisation; this is because there are limits to what can be achieved through hardware and technological solutions alone, human factors have a specific part to play in achieving and maintaining high standards of health and safety (Davis et al., 2001). Safety Climate has been researched for approximately 35 years and studies have proved that safety climate has strong associations with safety behaviours, self-reported accident and injuries in industrial sectors. Also, safety climate is the closest concept to OSH climate in the current research, therefore a review of safety climate is essential for the conceptualization of OSH climate.

Due to large amount of researches on safety climate in order to understand the constructs and concepts of safety climate and to identify the characteristics of safety climate and its related factors. A systematic search of the published literature was conducted using a computerized search of the PsyInfo, Embase and Medline databases. We selected the search terms to capture generic and specific words relevant to safety culture and climate on the basis of Subject heading terms and text words from a priori identified review articles:

52

Guldenmund (2000), Flin et al. (2000) and Clarke (2006). Keywords for the computer-based searches included safety climate, safety culture, safety attitudes and safety perceptions. The computer search was complemented by a manual search of review articles by Guldenmund (2000), Flin et al. (2000) and Clarke (2006), and the reference sections of all articles identified. The database was searched for records from all entries up to, and including, the year 2009. The initial searches yielded over 1421 articles. The criteria for inclusion in analysis were that the article must contain (2) a measure of safety culture/climate and (2) study safety

culture/climate in workplace settings, and (3) published in English. Under these criteria, 84 articles were excluded, leaving a sample of 1337 articles. Articles found from this literature search were reviewed and assist the conceptualisation of the key OSH constructs: climate, behaviours, knowledge and outcomes.

The earliest located paper on safety climate is Keenan et al. (1951)‟s study on introspective ratings from primary individuals in an automotive plant. It was not until 1980 that Zohar developed a safety climate measure and defined safety climate as "a summary of molar perceptions that employees share about their work environments...a frame of reference for guiding appropriate and adaptive risk behaviours". More recently, Griffin and Neal (2000) argued for a more explicit definition of safety climate in that it should be comprised of the employees' perceptions of the policies, procedures and practices relating to safety. Others provided a wide range of definitions for safety climate, for example employees‟ beliefs about safety (Williamson et al., 1997) and attitudes and perceptions toward OSH issues (Coyle et al., 1995).

In Guldenmund (2000)‟s review of safety culture and climate, he commented that perceptions are more associated with climate whereas attitudes are considered to be a part of culture and Neal and Griffin (2004) also suggested that if the aim of a safety climate study is to assess the effect of different environmental factors on the safety of the employees, then it is better to frame the questions perceptually rather attitudinally in the measures. Guldenmund (2000) also reviewed the characteristics of safety climate definitions and concluded that most of them stressed the „shared‟ aspect of climate, for instance terms like “molar” (Zohar, 1980;

53

Dedobbeleer & Beland, 1991), “shared” (Diaz & Cabrera, 1997), “summary” (Williamson et al., 1997), and “group” (Brown & Holmes, 1986) appeared in all the definitions reviewed. Also, the object of these safety perceptions, attitudes and beliefs are often identified with “work environment” (Zohar, 1980; Dedobbeleer & Beland, 1991; Diaz & Cabrera, 1997), “safety” (Coyle et al., 1995; Williamson et al., 1997), and organisational safety policies (Diaz & Cabrera, 1997; Griffin & Neal, 2000f).

Following the work of Neal and Griffin (2000), Neal and Griffin (2004) proposed that perceptions of specific aspects of safety will load onto first-order factors and that these first- order factors will load onto a common higher-order factor, reflecting global perceptions of safety. The first order factors of safety climate factors should reflect perceptions of safety- related policies, procedures, and rewards. The higher order factor of safety climate should reflect the extent to which employees believe that safety is valued within the organisation.

Although there has been significant effort put into defining safety climate, most definitions are very global and thus highly implicit. The concept of safety climate was not comprehensively developed, and there is a lack of clear and consistent construct definitions and

conceptualizations, both on the predictor and criterion sides (Clarke, 2006), Christian (2009) suggested that no study has comprehensively addressed the deficiencies.

Alongside with the conceptualization of safety climate, the recent interest in measuring safety climate results a large number of assessment instruments. They are mostly in the form of self report questionnaires administered as large scale surveys in different sectors, principally the energy industries, but also in manufacturing and construction. Similar to the

conceptualization of safety climate, studies argued that there is lack of unifying theoretical model in this area and reflected that inductive rather than deductive approach has been used in operation (Guldenmund, 2000, Williamson 1997). In the previous reviews of the measures of safety climate, Williamson et al. (1997) examined seven reports measuring safety climate and concluded that eight factors could be discerned, four measuring attitudes and four perceptions, although they presented no detailed analysis of which of these eight factors were

54

derived from particular questionnaires. In Dedobbeleer and Beland (1998)‟s review of ten safety climate instruments, only two factors: management commitment and worker

involvement had been properly replicated across studies. Dedobbeleer and Beland (1998) and Coyle et al. (1995) found different factor structures using the same safety climate scale in two Australian health care organisations. The study concluded that it was highly doubtful to establish a universal and stable set of safety climate factors. Recently, Flin et al. (2000) did an extensive review of safety climate measures, they conclude there are some recurring themes across safety climate surveys include management, safety systems, risk, work pressure and competence. Regarding to the different work practices and policies, the actual item components of each theme are variable and are likely to be industry or even company specific.

In the discussion of industry specific safety climate measures, some researchers have attempted to developed measure of safety climate in particular industry, for example nuclear power, energy supply, manufacturing (Cox & Cox, 1991; Cox et al., 1998). In particular, there were some significant examples of context specific measures, for instance: Cox and Cheyne (2000) derived from other instruments and developed a nine factor measure of safety climate specially for use in offshore oil and gas processing organisations. All the items loaded onto nine factors: management commitment; priority of safety; communication; safety rules; supportive environment; involvement; personal priorities and need for safety; personal appreciation of risk; and work environment. The instrument was developed from

assessments used in a range of different industries, including nuclear power, energy supply. Meanwhile, Varonen and Mattila (2000) attempted to examine safety climate in wood

processing companies, the study included four factors to measure the safety climate in eight Finnish wood processing companies. These four factors included: organisational

responsibility, safety supervision, and company safety precautions and employee attitudes toward safety. Results at the organisational level analysis show that employee perceptions of organisational responsibility and company safety precautions were negatively associated with expert ratings of workplace hazards and with accidents. Recently, Evans et al. (2007) developed a tool to assess the level of perceived safety climates for pilots, it was a 3-factor

55

model of management commitment and communication, safety training and equipment, and maintenance.

The academic interest of studying safety climate has driven many researchers to identify the appropriate safety climate factors and measures for different countries and in different languages. For example, Vinodkumar and Bhasi (2009) identified management commitment and actions for safety, workers‟ knowledge and compliance to safety, workers‟ attitude towards safety, workers‟ participations and commitment to safety, safeness of work

environment, emergency preparedness in the organisation, priority for safety over production and risk justification as the eight safety climate factors in the chemical industry in India. Another eight dimensions (free communication flow, continuous improvement, reporting/rules compliance, and patient/ family involvement, supervisors‟ safety leadership, allied

professionals‟ safety leadership, patient safety committee leadership and rules/equipment availability) measuring patient safety climate scale was developed in Japan (Matsubara et al., 2008). However, with the diversity of safety climate instruments, there is not a single

instrument develop for the Chinese population or in Chinese.

In document INSTITUTO POLITÉCNICO NACIONAL (página 49-56)