Safety Climate Improvement: Case Study in a Chinese Construction Company

Abstract

A positive safety climate can improve employees’ safety awareness and reduce workers’ unsafe behaviors. Having consistent key factors that comprise safety climate is paramount in facilitating the measurement and comparison of safety climate over time which helps identify effective approaches to improve safety performance. This paper examines the consistency of safety climate factor structure and safety climate improvements over time in a Chinese construction company. It adopts a case study approach and reports on using the same safety climate instrument to carry out two surveys, three years apart. The exploratory factor analysis showed that the obtained four-factor structure of safety climate remained consistent across the two surveys. Moreover, the confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated that the second-order factor of safety climate was unchanged. Statistically significant improvements were also found on all four identified factors. The governmental or organizational strategies and/or tactics that could stimulate positive improvements on safety climate factors (referred to as stimulators hereinafter) were then identified via interviews with safety management officers in the company. The most effective stimulators were found to include constituting the safety regulations and safety rules, as well as increasing the intensity of safety training and safety promotion. Implications on the consistent factor structure of safety climate and the stimulators are also discussed.