AGENTI DI CLIMA E PERFORMANCE DI SICUREZZA: UN'ANALISI MULTILIVELLO

Safety climate has been one of the most frequently studied antecedents of safety performance in the last thirty years. It is commonly defined as the shared perceptions of the employees on policies, procedures, and practices relating to safety. A large number of scales to assess safety climate have been created in last two decades. Nevertheless, meta-analytic studies and reviews on safety climate reveal that some issues are still open from a theoretical and methodological point of view. From a theoretical point of view, for example there is still ambiguity about safety climate themes and dimensions. From a methodological point of view there is confusion about the levels of analysis, because many measuring instruments in safety climate research use items referring at the same time to organizational, group and individual levels. Furthermore, authors analysing safety climate did not always considered its multilevel structure and the importance to use adequate techniques to approach multilevel data: if the data collected are multilevel in nature they should be analysed accordingly. Safety climate can be investigated at two hierarchical levels: group level and organizational level. At the group level, safety climate usually refers to the role of supervisor and not to co-workers. The role of co-workers has been studied regarding different aspects: co-workers’ support, co-workers’ practices, social norms, co-workers’ interaction, and also regarding a more generalized content as co-worker safety. Co-workers can be identified as a safety agent as much important as the organization and the supervisor, and organizational and supervisor's safety response significantly and positively predict co-workers' safety response. The present research offers an instrument to measure safety climate by the safety agents' point of view (organization, supervisor, co-workers) and to study the relationships between the integrated system of safety climates, inspired by Zohar and Melià studies on safety climate, and workers' safety performance with a multilevel approach. In particular the research is composed of three studies. The main aim of the first study was to propose a questionnaire combining different approaches to safety climate, to give a contribute about these issues. This study led to the development of a new questionnaire to measure safety climate, suitable for blue-collar workers in the industrial sector. A multilevel confirmatory factor analysis (MCFA) was used to properly evaluate the factor structure underlying the safety climate questionnaire composed of three scales: Organizational Safety Climate (OSC) scale, Supervisor's Safety Climate (SSC) scale and Co-workers' Safety Climate (CSC) scale. The clear distinction, made with the use of three different scales, among safety agents (organization, supervisor, co-workers), gives an instrument to assess workers' perceptions focused on each level, and allows to deeply explore, for instance, lateral relationships of supervisor's safety climate and co-workers' safety climate, analysing the interactions between the roles of these two safety agents. A two-level design was used, considering the individual level and the work-group level. Data collection involved 1312 blue-collars from 7 Italian manufacturing companies. The MCFA results demonstrated the importance to use proper analysis to study the factor structure of a multilevel construct as safety climate, and confirmed the theoretical structure of safety climate purposed by Griffin and colleagues, using not only psychological climate (that is, the individual level), but also the group level safety climate. They purposed a structure with a global higher order factor, reflecting the extent to which employees believe that safety is valued within the organization, and four first order factors, reflecting perceptions on specific facets of safety climate (management values, safety systems, safety training and safety communication). The aim of the second study was to investigate the relationship between safety climate and safety performance, considering safety climate as an integrated system of many climates. Firstly, the evaluation of an integrated system of safety climates with multilevel structural equation modelling was performed. Then, we assessed the relationships between the integrated system of safety climate and safety behaviours using the same technique. To analyse safety climate as an integrated system of safety climates – a system in which safety climate is defined for each safety agent in an organization, not only top management and supervisors, but also co-workers – permits to study more deeply the interactions of different climates at different organizational levels, and the relationships between these climates and safety behaviours. We used a two-level design which considered the individual level and the work-group level. Data collection involved 991 blue-collars, belonging to 91 work groups, from 5 Italian manufacturing companies. The research evidenced the importance of considering, at group level, not only climate referred to supervisor, but also climate referred to co-workers. Furthermore, analyses revealed that co-workers' safety climate had a stronger influence on safety behaviours, and in particular on safety participation, than supervisor's safety climate, at individual level as well at group level. Griffin & Neal (2000) and then Christian, Bradley, Wallace, & Burke (2009) proposed a conceptual framework to organize relationships between antecedents and safety criteria, and tested this structure with a meta-analytic path modelling. The aim of the third study was to combine this conceptual framework with the integrated system of safety climates and to study the resulting model in a multilevel perspective. In this model co-workers' safety climate and supervisor's safety climate were considered as mediators in the relationship between safety climate at the organizational level and determinants (safety motivation and safety knowledge) and components (safety compliance and safety participation) of safety performance. A two-level design which considered the individual level and the work-group level was performed. Data collection involved 673 blue-collars, belonging to 63 work groups, from 5 Italian manufacturing companies. The results confirm the mediating role of safety performance determinants in the relationships between the safety climates' system and safety performance, and the role of the system of safety climates as leading predictor of safety performance. In conclusion, the present research could be considered as one of the first attempt to investigate a global and integrated framework on the influence of safety climate, as a system of safety agents' climates, on safety performance with multilevel structural equation modelling analyses. We hope that it can be a contribution for the development of a more integrated and proper approach in safety climate research. Furthermore, we hope that the developed questionnaire for blue-collars workers in Italian industrial sector becomes an instrument to promote the safety climate analyses as an important step in safety management systems of Italian industrial companies.