This meta-analysis reviewed the antecedents of psychological and organisational safety climate, organised into three categories: situational factors, interpersonal interactions, and personal factors. Link in comments.
There’s heaps to unpack here, so I’ll focus on a few things I liked.
Psychological safety climate was related to antecedents reflected under situational factors (eg leadership), interpersonal interactions (leader-member exchange, team-member exchange) and personal factors (eg conscientiousness).
Although personal factors (personality traits etc.) had moderate effects on psychological safety climate – interpersonal (strongest effects) and organisational factors, including leadership, had stronger correlations with climate.
Even where personal antecedents influenced climate – it had this effect largely due to interpersonal interactions. Found was employees make sense of situational factors based more on organisational & leader norms and behaviours, than job or individual factors.
For specifics, in job characteristics, job demands and job resources both had moderate correlations with safety climate. In job demands, psychological demands and physical demands had moderate correlations, whereas in job resources, job control and job autonomy had moderate to strong correlations. For leadership, it generally exhibited reliably moderate to strong correlations (eg transformational, transactional and authentic leadership). Interestingly, destructive leadership was only weakly and negatively correlated.
Coworker influence had a weak but substantial relationship with safety climate and coworker safety attitudes had a strnger effect than coworker support. Group size, defined as the number of people working in a work unit, was found to have a weak negative relationship with organisational safety climate (i.e. as group size increases, safety climate level decreases).
On leadership, it supports findings that leaders “represent the interests, goals, and values of the organization” (p.24). Positive leadership styles were found to have a “strong positive relationship with safety climate, suggesting that managers/supervisors play an important role in the level of safety climate” (p25).
Organisational characteristics resulted in stronger effects on safety climate than did job characteristics, thus “employees’ perceptions of workplace safety were influenced more by organizational than job factors” (p23-24).
As further explained by the authors, given that job characteristics and organisational climate are important predictors of safety climate, trying to improve them seems well-advised. This may include reducing the psychological and physical demands of work, increasing job control and creating a supportive and trusting environment (p25). Leaders should further promote safety-related interpersonal interactions and encourage knowledge sharing about safety-oriented experiences; said to further reinforce safety norms and priorities.
Moving back to the personal factors, although these were found to have “not negligible” effects on safety climate (e.g. via conscientiousness, locus of control, extraversion, openness to experience), personal factors seem to be less important “antecedents of safety climate as they associated with safety climate to a lesser extent” (p25).
In my view, it supports research that organisational and social interactions have stronger correlations to climate than individual factors. That is, performance and behaviour is likely more a property of the systems and interactions than individual factors (e.g. “hearts and minds”).
Authors: Yimin He, Yi Wang, Stephanie C. Payne, 2019, Organizational Psychology Review
Link: https://doi.org/10.1177%2F2041386619874870
Link to the LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-safety-climate-formed-meta-analysis-antecedents-ben-hutchinson
SafetyInsights.org 