Influence Of Safety Climate On Safety Behavior And Development Of Safety Climate Survey Tool

Occupational health and safety is getting a shift of focus with economics and civilization development. Safety culture obtains much more interest because of its positive influence on safety performance. The development of construction industry is affected by its reputation of poor safety performance. Construction industry calls for positive safety culture to improve its safety performance because of its mobility on employee, workplace and task. Safety climate survey is widely used in safety culture quantitive research while reflecting the atmosphere of safety culture and providing chance of safety participation. It is found that in safety climate research, influencing factors of safety climate, relationship between safety climate and safety behavior, safety climate factor explanation, and influence of survey data hierarchical structure, have not been given proper attention before.Safety climate factors were identified by exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis in this thesis. SEM (Structural Equation Modeling) was used to find out the influencing factors of safety climate and the relationship between safety climate and safety behavior. The presented case study shows that individual factors such as age, family responsibility, drinking, work position, have influence on safety climate, and safety climate has notable positive influence on safety behavior.Safety Plus, a health and safety climate survey tool designed for China Mainland and Hong Kong, was also developed based on the above research results. Compared with similar tools, Safety Plus is more flexible, general and powerful to satisfy most users' requirements as an applicable tool to conduct safety climate survey in China Mainland and Hong Kong.Factor extraction and rotation methods were compared for their possible influence on safety climate factor explanation. The case study of this thesis shows that factor extraction method has influence on explanation, and factor rotation is critical for explanation. It is suggested that in similar researches extraction method is deliberately chosen and rotation method is reported with detailed comparison of rotation results. The impact on the research results due to between-sites difference was estimated by multilevel analysis and is found to be neglectable.This thesis confirms the notable positive influence of safety climate on safety behavior, which suggests organization management to enhance positive safety climae to promote its safety performance. Safety Plus can be used to conduct safety climate survey in construction industry in China Mainland and Hong Kong, and will be helpful for organization management to enhance its safety climate by benchmarking its results. This thesis can also be referred on factor extraction and rotation.