Safety Climate Among Nontraditional Workers in Construction: Arguing for a Focus on Construed External Safety Image.

Emily Stiehl,Linda Forst

doi:10.1177/1048291117752461

Abstract

Safety climate, employees' perceptions of work-related safety, 1 has been promoted as a leading indicator of workplace safety in construction. 2 , 3 While research has primarily examined internal organizational sources (e.g., manager attitudes, formal organizational policies) on these perceptions, external sources of information might be more relevant to construction workers in nontraditional jobs who work for a limited time and/or have limited interaction with other employees. This paper argues for the future development of a construed external safety image scale to measure employees' perceptions about how external groups view their organization's safety. 4 The construed external safety image would capture the external sources that nontraditional workers use to assess safety climate and will allow public health researchers to identify and change dangerous workplaces while more effectively communicating information about safe workplaces to workers. The public health relevance of safety climate and construed external safety image for monitoring and communicating safety to nontraditional workers require examination.

Highlights

Improving safety to reduce physical injury at work is an important focus for public health research and practice
The goal of this paper is to argue for a new measure to capture the relative importance of external forces, in addition to internal ones, for measuring safety climate among nontraditional workers
While nontraditional workers exist in a variety of industries and occupations, we focus here on the construction context in order to practically illustrate construed external safety image (CESI) as a contributor to safety climate in this segment of the workforce

Summary

Introduction

Improving safety to reduce physical injury at work is an important focus for public health research and practice. In the United States, the number of employees in isolated, temporary, or part-time occupations is large and growing.[13] They include workers in a range of occupations, such as construction, seasonal farm work, retail, and home care. These nontraditional workers are engaged in so-called precarious work. They often are employed for short or fixed durations, move between multiple sites or employers, and have less job security than full-time workers Both a lack of job stability and a lack of familiarity among work teams can undermine safety outcomes in organizations. This leaves little time for them to develop their own informed perception, much less a shared perception, of what their employer thinks about safety

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