Health, safety and environmental climate: An evaluation within an international organization

Recent years have seen an increased focus placed on the idea of a health and safety climate by both researchers and practitioners of occupational safety and health. A great deal of ambiguity remains, however, concerning: the definition of the safety climate concept; the factors that comprise the safety climate of an organization; the consistency of a climate measure across a multinational organization; and the utility of the concept to be used as a predictor of incident and injury rates. A second area of research concerning management systems, more specifically environmental management systems, has also increased in recent years. As with health and safety research, a number of questions still remain regarding the benefit to organizations that implement formal environmental management systems that are based on international standards.;There are four specific objectives of this research. First, this research uses safety and health climate factor scores from within a multinational organization to develop a regression model to predict incident rates. The results from this study indicate that there is a weak relationship between climate scores and injury rates. Second, this research assesses the consistency in climate factor scores across nationalities within a singular multinational organization. This research indicates that health and safety climate component scores are not consistent across a multinational organization. Third, a climate scale is developed to measure an organization's environmental climate. Scores from this climate scale are checked against aggregation criteria to validate that the individual scores could be aggregated to represent a true measure of the organization's environmental climate. Fourth, this study assesses whether the utilization of environmental management systems based on international standards leads to higher environmental climate scores. The results from this study indicate that environmental climate component scores are not significantly higher in facilities which utilize a formal environmental management system based on international environmental standards.