Safety climate and its relationship with construction company safety management systems and programs.

Details

• Personal Author:
  Dennerlein J ; Grant M ; Marin LS
• Description:
  Background: Organizational models of safety climate suggest it is influenced by organizational policies, programs and practices such as safety management systems. However, evidence of these influences is still limited, particularly in construction. Often, construction companies report both low implementation of SMS and poor safety climate. Therefore, our three exploratory studies determined relationships between organization and workplace indicators of safety management systems and workers' perceptions of safety climate. Methods: First, we completed a cross-sectional study of 401 workers from 26 construction sites from 58 companies registered with ConstructSecure Inc. (Lexington, MA), a safety pre-qualification database. The database generates a score on a 100-point scale for each company, which is based on measurements of the company's SMS as well as other safety programs and worker policies. Worker surveys assessed safety climate based on the 9 questions in a measure for construction. Spearman rank correlations evaluated the association between the CSAP score and the safety climate score. Second, we utilized weekly safety inspection scores from safety managers' walkthroughs and weekly safety climate scores fRom, William N.orker surveys collected at six commercial construction sites (20,000 sq ft to 485,000 sq ft) over a four to five-month period per site. Linear mixed effects models estimated weekly safety climate scores from the concurrent and the previous weekly work site safety inspections scores. Third, using a sample of 25 commercial construction companies in Colombia, we examined the relationship between workers' safety climate perceptions and SMS. Implementation of SMS was evaluated using 86 desirable practices, and the Nordic Safety Climate Questionnaire (NOSACQ-50) was used to assess workers' perceptions of safety climate. Injury rates were calculated from a database of claims provided by the 25 companies. Generalized linear models were used to test associations. Results: For our first study, there were, at best, weak correlations between workers' safety climate scores and the measurements of the company's safety management systems scores, with marginal statistical significance with two groupings of the data. However, for the second study, concurrent weekly safety inspections were significant predictors of safety climate in our unadjusted and adjusted analysis (p <0.0001). Safety inspections were not significant (p=0.9426) predictors of safety climate measured one week after the inspection. Finally in the third study, workers' perceptions of safety climate were independent of their own company's implementation of SMS, and its injury rates. However, injury rates were negatively related to the implementation of SMSs. Discussion: Our goal was to examine the relationship between safety climate and SMS for construction companies. We saw weak correlations between our metrics of safety management systems and safety climate in these construction companies. We examined associations between physical working conditions and safety climate measures that appeared to be somewhat temporal in nature. Given the dynamic aspects of construction worksites, traditional theories surrounding safety climate suggest that a worker who is on site for a short period of time may not be able to perceive a company's safety management system. However, since the ultimate goal of a strong, positive SMS is to reduce risk, working conditions in a construction site may be a better measure of the effectiveness of the SMS articulated through the working condition rather than through verbal and policy communications.
• Subjects:
  Accidents, Occupational Air Pollutants, Occupational Air Pollution, Indoor Health Care Facilities Workforce And Services Manufacturing And Industrial Facilities Occupational Health Paint Preceptorship Safety Staff Development Surveys And Questionnaires Workplace

  More +
• Keywords:
  Construction Industry Construction Workers Cross Sectional Studies Policy Safety Climate Safety Programs Worker Safety
• Publisher:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Document Type:
  Text
• Funding:
  Cooperative Agreement
• Genre:
  Abstract
• Place as Subject:
  Massachusetts ; OSHA Region 1 ; OSHA Region 3 ; Pennsylvania
• CIO:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)
• Topic:
  Workplace Safety & Health
• Location:
  North America
• Pages in Document:
  117-118
• NIOSHTIC Number:
  nn:20065666
• Citation:
  National Occupational Injury Research Symposium 2018, (NOIRS 2018), October 16-18, 2018, Morgantown, West Virginia. Morgantown, WV: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, 2018 Oct; :117-118
• Email:
  J.Dennerlein@northeastern.edu
• Federal Fiscal Year:
  2019
• NORA Priority Area:
  Construction ; Healthcare and Social Assistance
• Performing Organization:
  Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts
• Peer Reviewed:
  False
• Start Date:
  20070901
• End Date:
  20260831
• Collection(s):
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:93de150839acbf3dc2407009741637fff1511eb6a5992c3f027b9dde1b729d15913adae5c744e611f42182e5eb95edddd9f08db362df3ec071ca48477cdfbb48
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/181955/cdc_181955_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 41.18 KB ]