Abstract
Although safety climate has been the object of multiple studies in the last thirty years, the relationship between safety climate and organizational climate has been scarcely investigated. The Organizational and Safety Climate Inventory (OSCI) was the first and only validated instrument to allow the assessment of organizational and safety climates simultaneously and by using the same theoretical framework. The present work investigated the psychometric properties of OSCI in an Italian sample at the group level; study 1 (N = 745) examined the factor structure of the scale by using confirmatory factor analyses. Study 2 (N = 471) advanced the original Portuguese validation by testing its measurement equivalence across gender and company sector through multiple-group confirmatory factor analyses. Results confirmed one higher-order factor structure with four first-order factors for both Organizational Climate and Safety Climate, with Organizational Climate predicting Safety Climate. Moreover, the scale was found to be invariant between men and women and between different types of company. Reliability, discriminant, and criterion validities of the scale showed very good values. Overall, the findings strengthened the original claim of the OSCI to be a valid and innovative instrument, which allows the identification of specific dimensions of safety climate, starting from a more general model of organizational climate.
Highlights
In the last fifty years, the topic of safety and accidents prevention has been studied from many points of view, identifying both the importance of organizational climate [1,2,3] and of safety climate [3,4,5] in their intervening role on issues related to safety behaviors
Only when the measurement equivalence of a scale is established researchers can proceed with examining mean group scores, having confidence that if any group differences are found, these are due to actual differences in safety perceptions and not to an artefact of measurement error [45]. Considering all these issues, the main aim of the present study is to contribute to the validation of an Italian adaptation of the Organizational and Safety Climate Inventory (OSCI) inventory developed by Silva et al [6] and it is aimed at (1) examining its psychometric properties when applied to a different context; (2) exploring its measurement equivalence across gender and company sector [45,46]; (3) assessing its discriminant validity and criterion validity
The aim of this study was to verify if there were different psychometric characteristics in the Organizational and Safety Climate Inventory when applied to the Italian context
Summary
In the last fifty years, the topic of safety and accidents prevention has been studied from many points of view, identifying both the importance of organizational climate [1,2,3] and of safety climate [3,4,5] in their intervening role on issues related to safety behaviors. If both climates have been demonstrated to have a fundamental role on safety performance and outcomes, it appears that the relationship between the two has not been sufficiently explored [6]. The research in this area is only at an early stage [11]
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