Safety climate in a university physical plant and its relationship to self-reported injury

In industrial settings, NIOSH researchers and others have shown employee perceptions of their organization's commitment to safety and/or safety climate to be important correlates to both the adoption and maintenance of safety work practices, and predicting work place injury rates. However, safety climate measures have never been addressed or evaluated in a major teaching and research university setting. In this study, we developed a tool (questionnaire) to measure the safety climate in a university physical plant department in order to examine its effect on worker self-reported workplace injury and illness.; The U.W.-Madison physical plant employs workers in jobs ranging from custodial services to skilled trades. It is the university division that most reflects risk and injury reported on safety climates in industry settings. The study measures the safety climate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison physical plant workers and incidences of self-reported injuries in the same employees for the year 2001. Additionally, the actual State of Wisconsin Workers Compensation Injury and Illness Data for the same Physical Plant Units are also reviewed.; A 39-item questionnaire, including 22 safety climate items, self-reported injury and illness and demographic questions, was developed and given to a sample of 589 U.W.-Madison Physical Plant workers with potential risk for injury during the course of their job duties. The response rate was 81% (79% Trade Shops Unit; 84% Custodial Services Unit) of the entire Physical Plant employees.; A 20-item scale that measures workers perceptions of safety climate was extracted through exploratory factor analysis from the original 22 safety climate items. This safety climate scale loadings on components or factors revealed 6 different constructs: (1) management support and training; (2) PPE availability; (3) risk perception; (4) environment condition; (5) time pressure; and (6) social support. Of these six factors, one factor, management support and training accounted for the most loadings and greatest variance explained. This concurs with past safety climate studies and most of the safety climate or safety culture questionnaires in the peer-reviewed literature. Because of the high correlations among these 6 factors, a one factor “general safety climate index” (GSCI) was created by loading all 22 items on one component.