The Validity and Reliability of Safety Leadership Scales in Universities of Taiwan

[[abstract]]According to social system theory, the author proposes a conceptual framework with organizational safety leadership as an independent variable, safety climate as a mediator, and safety performance as a dependent variable. This author’s contention is that leadership with high quality will enhance a proactive safety culture and then promote excellent safety performance. This study aims to develop a safety leadership scale (SLS) with construct validity and reliability that can be employed to evaluate the safety leadership of presidents in the universities of Taiwan. The author adopted judgmental sampling to obtain data from 430 employees in two universities in central Taiwan. The total valid respondents are 322, with a 74.88% response rate. The author conducted exploratory factor analysis and internal consistence analysis with SPSS and extracted three constructs: safety caring, safety coaching, and safety controlling. Each eigen-value is over 8.0 and the accumulated explanatory variance reaches 70.68%. Cronbachα of the three sub-scales and the whole scale more than 0.9. Thus, this SLS shows both construct validity and reliability. Ideas developed in this study need further examination in future empirical research