Safety Climate and Designing Interventions to Improve Safety Performance

David M. DeJoy, Todd D. Smith, Aimee A. DyalWorkplace Health GroupCollege of Public Health

University of Georgia

Status of Safety Climate Research

• Recent meta-analyses (up to 200 studies) show safety climate among the strongest predictors of safety behaviors and related outcomes (e.g., Beus et al. 2010; Christian et al. 2009; Nahrgang et al. 2011)

• Safety climate as a “leading indicator”• Most research cross-sectional; few longitudinal

or intervention studies• Very little empirical research specific to

emergency responders

Safety ClimateCore Concept: Shared perceptions of employees

about (relative) importance of safety within their organization

Intersection between organizational and psychological processes and their relationship to safety (Neal & Griffin, 2004)

Social-cognitive mediator between environmental attributes and outcomes (Zohar & Luria, 2004)

Climate-Behavior-Outcome:Basic Model

SafetyClimate

Behavior Outcomes

Intervention: Antecedents Perspective

SafetyClimate Behavior OutcomesAntecedents

Safety Climate Research

• Most of the attention has been given to defining and measuring safety climate

• Less is known about antecedents and mechanisms linking safety climate and outcomes

• This hampers intervention development

e.g., Clarke, 2006; Zohar, 2010

Business Environment

National Culture

OrganizationalVision/strategy

Organizational Culture

Organizational Structure &

Practices

OrganizationalClimate

Safety CultureSafety Policies

& PracticesSafetyClimate

Antecedents: Broader Organizational Factors

(adapted from Ostroff et al., 2003)

What Qualifies as a Safety Climate Intervention

• Arguably, anything that increases the salience of safety could potentially qualify as a safety climate intervention: – recent accident/injury (e.g., Beus et al., 2010; Desai et al., 2006)– initiation of a new safety approach or program component

(e.g., behavior-based safety)• Safety can be improved without necessarily

improving safety climate, and vice versa (partial mediation, e.g., Clarke, 2009)

• However, actions that improve safety climate will frequently improve safety – through increased knowledge/motivation/extra-role (OCB) behaviors, etc.

Safety Climate Interventions: General Literature

• Enacted safety policies and practices: management commitment/actions >

words• supervisor leadership/support –

transformational/transactional leadership trust - voice - coaching - motivation

Underscores the social-communicative aspects of safety climate (e.g., Rochlin, 1999); collective sense-making (e.g., Weick, 1995)

Firefighting

• Without question, firefighting is high hazard work, but it is unique beyond this.

• In most high hazard work situations, the goal is hazard avoidance. In firefighting, the principal work activity is hazard engagement.

• The hazards associated with this work activity are further worsened by unpredictability and extreme time pressure.

Safety Climate and Firefighting

• We assume that the safety climate construct is relevant to firefighting

• So little research that we don’t know what it looks like compared to other types of work

• Difficult to conceptualize interventions with any degree of specificity

• What have we learned?

Firefighter Fatality Investigations (fishbone diagram)

Kunadharaju, Smith, & DeJoy, 2011(189 fatalities, 2004 to 2009)

Factors on left side assumed to impact those on right.

Firefighter Fatality Investigations

Kunadharaju, Smith, & DeJoy, 2011

Fatality Study: Cultural Paradigm

• Operating with too few resources• Compromising certain roles and functions• Skipping or short-changing operational steps or

safeguards• Relying on extreme individual effortsThese operational tenets accepted and normalized as “the way we do things”. This tolerance of risk internally and externally reinforced.

Safety Climate: Firefighting“proof of concept”

Smith & DeJoy, 2014

SEM Results

Significant first order factors of safety climate

Factor Unstandardized Path Coefficient

SE t p R2

Safety Communication 1.00 0.00 - - .24

Management Commitment

2.46 0.33 13.22 0.00 .60

Supervisor Support 1.47 0.16 9.48 0.00 .44

Safety Programs & Policies

1.42 0.22 6.37 0.00 .62

Smith & DeJoy, 2014

(career firefighters, N=349)

SEM Results

Path Unstandardized Path Coefficient

SE t p R2

Safety Climate → Safety Compliance Behavior

1.09 .13 8.17 0.00 .50

Safety Climate→ Safety Citizenship Behavior

1.396 .21 6.96 0.00 .33

Smith & DeJoy, 2014

Safety climate and safety compliance and participation

Firefighter Focus Groups10 focus groups: Two large metro departments; groups segmented by rank (frontline, company officers, dept. senior leaders); N = 86; 72 to 96 minutes per group.

Groups asked to discuss: individual, workgroup, and organizational factors related to safe performance in emergency response situations.

Focus Group Results

Level Key Emergent ThemesIndividual Competency/professionalism

Physical/mental readinessWorkgroup Cohesion

Supervisor leadership/supportOrganizational Politics/bureaucracy

ResourcesLeadershipHiring/promotion

Focus Groups: individual level“I rely that these guys know the SOPs [standard operating procedures]. The basic SOPs. Yeah, we’re going to find weird scenarios. We’re going to find… there will also be a curveball but those training SOPs, the idea that we are all relying on each other, that we know those basic jobs regardless of morale, regardless of your attitude for the day. The bell goes off and we show up. I am relying on these guys to know their basic job.” (Firefighter, dept. 2)

“For instance, we go into a structure, we have a structure fire. You will have too many members in that one structure when it doesn’t need to be, but nobody wants to be seen on the outside. It’s the macho thing where everybody just floods this house.” (company officer, dept. 1)

We talked about strains and sprains. [But] the one injury that all of us get pretty early on are the invisible emotional injuries where your first day … you go to a shooting, you go to stabbing, you go to a child murder, whatever. It could be real extreme or it could be less than [that] but your system gets a jolt.” (senior leader, dept. 2)

Focus Groups: Workgroup Level “The crew gets a rapport, you all know each other. You learn each other’s tactics and you know what is going on at the home life so you actually start functioning as a team.” (company officer, dept. 2)

“He taught you what to do. He taught you why to do it. We always ate dinner together. Whether we really wanted to or not, we always ate dinner together. He always made sure of that.” (firefighter, dept. 1)

“By design, usually your most up-to-date information is getting put out in those recruit schools. They’re learning techniques and procedures that their officers didn’t learn and haven’t trained on, so when they come to the station, they look up to that officer and that officer says I don’t care what you learned in training. That’s not the way we do it out here.” (senior leader, dept. 1)

Focus Groups: Organizational Level“Fire chiefs positions have become so political that fire chiefs finding themselves creeping their organizations into these mission creep situations to try to not only maintain the department’s relevance in the community, but their relevance within the political structure of the city or county or whatever.” (senior leader, dept. 1)

“When I came on we had some senior chiefs who could run a fireground, who had been there with the experience factor, strong command presence.” (company officer, dept. 1)

“if you go off on a workers’ comp issue, you’re really considered the cheater of the system. Or why did you get hurt? You shouldn’t have gotten hurt, we’re not supposed to get hurt and I understand that we are not supposed to get hurt but this is a difficult dangerous job.”(company officer, dept. 2)

Interventions: Moving Forward(re: firefighting)

Emphasis on supervisor/workgroup factors holds promise due to nature/organization of work activity; potential for org-workgroup disconnects; undoing of best practices

– Transformational leadership– After-action reviews– Supervisor retraining/updating– Trust/collective sense-making– Control/autonomy balance

• Management commitment (senior leader support) also important– Communicating/redefining safety– Building a supportive organization– Involvement/participatory processes– High reliability organizations

The Public (Firefighter Image and Expectations)

Firefighters (Firefighter Heritage and Traditions)

Gov’t FireDept.

FireStation Firefighter Injury/

Death

Firefighting Organizations and Firefighters are Trapped between their Public Image and their own Heritage and Traditions

The image is of heroism and self-sacrifice for the good of others. The tradition is “can do”, “must do”, “make do” , and “right now”

Core Organizational Task

Core Organizational

Task*

Department

Individual Workgroup

Com

mun

ity

* e.g., Reiman & Oedewald, 2007

Thanks!

Dave DeJoydmdejoy@uga.edu