Safety climate: its nature and predictive power

The field of organisational climate and of specific aspects such as safety climate, has produced a number of theoretical and empirical scientific contributions, and their applied interest is self-evident. The concept of safety climate, which is the main focus of this paper, emerged in the wake of the seminal work by Zohar (1980). The safety climate construct has been used in the literature on safety at work, as either an antecedent of accident rates or as an aspect to be measured for the correct assessment of company safety, or even as consequence of organisational features and actions such as type of company, size and safety investment. However, theoretical development of the concept has not been paralleled by appropriate empirical assessment, especially in the Spanish context. The aim of this paper is to test empirically the main theoretical properties of safety climate through multilevel statistical models, well-suited to this type of research design. Its specific objectives are: a) to empirically test the safety climate property of shared perception; b) to test the predictive power of safety climate in relation to accident rates; and c) to study the relative importance of the different safety climate dimensions in the context of Spanish industry, while statistically controlling for physical aspects of occupational safety