There is Nothing So Stable as Change: The Day-to-Day Stability of Safety Climate in the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry
Abstract
Safety climate is employees’ shared perceptions of the prioritization of safety in the workplace and of the value that organizations place on safe behaviors. Despite its importance in predicting adverse workplace safety-related events, organizations in the oil and gas industry typically only measure safety climate annually, at best. Absent an intervention or adverse event, the extant literature largely assumes that safety climate is a stable construct, though there are very few studies that directly test this assumption. If this assumption is incorrect, organizations may be effectively blind to changes in safety climate for months between assessments, losing an important indicator of an impending incident. To address this gap, this study followed two separate organizational samples of offshore oil and gas workers (Sample 1 n = 34; Sample 2 n = 36) for a period of 28 days, commonly referred to as a “hitch.” A total of 1,623 daily observations of safety climate were collected.
Overall, the daily means, standard deviations, and 1-day lagged correlations of safety climate remained relatively stable over the course of the hitch. Despite this observed stability, the relationship between any two measurements of safety climate significantly diminished as the amount of time between measurements increased. Dynamic structural equation modeling revealed that some individuals demonstrated much more stable safety climate perceptions than others, but none of the study variables could be used to explain this stability. Implications for safety climate theory and measurement of safety climate are discussed.
Description
Keywords
safety, offshore, oil and gas, occupational safety, personal safety, safety climate, time series, dynamic systems