Abstract
Zohar and Luria’s (2005) safety climate (SC) scale, measuring organization- and group- level SC each with 16 items, is widely used in research and practice. To improve the utility of the SC scale, we shortened the original full-length SC scales. Item response theory (IRT) analysis was conducted using a sample of 29,179 frontline workers from various industries. Based on graded response models, we shortened the original scales in two ways: (1) selecting items with above-average discriminating ability (i.e. offering more than 6.25% of the original total scale information), resulting in 8-item organization-level and 11-item group-level SC scales; and (2) selecting the most informative items that together retain at least 30% of original scale information, resulting in 4-item organization-level and 4-item group-level SC scales. All four shortened scales had acceptable reliability (≥0.89) and high correlations (≥0.95) with the original scale scores. The shortened scales will be valuable for academic research and practical survey implementation in improving occupational safety.
Highlights
The difficulty parameters reflected a sizeable range of the underlying construct, organizational-level safety climate (OSC) (−2.74 to 0.92), indicating that the OSC scale was generally more useful in identifying companies with poor to average OSC safety climate scores than very high OSC scores
The difficulty parameters reflected a sizeable range of the underlying construct, group-level safety climate (GSC) (−2.86 to 0.86), indicating that the GSC scale was generally more useful in identifying companies with poor and average GSC scores than very high level of safety climate
We expect that a shortened safety climate scale will increase the practical utility of safety climate assessments by reducing respondent burden and increasing face validity, especially for users who are concerned with the amount of time needed for survey administration and the measurement integrity
Summary
Safety climate research has been ongoing for more than 35 years, since Zohar published his seminal work in 1980 defining this construct as workers’ shared perceptions regarding their organization’s policies, procedures, and practices in relation to the value and importance of safety within that organization (Zohar, 1980; Griffin and Neal, 2000; Zohar, 2000, 2002, 2003). Safety climate influences employees’ motivation and knowledge to act in a safe manner, which in turn lead to safer behaviors and fewer accidents and injuries (Griffin and Neal, 2000; Christian et al, 2009)
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