A study of the lagged relationships among safety climate, safety motivation, safety behavior, and accidents at the individual and group levels.

TLDR

The study tracked safety climate, motivation, and behavior at two time points and used longitudinal analyses to examine simultaneous top‑down and bottom‑up processes over five years. Results show that group safety climate drives later individual motivation, which in turn predicts later safety behavior, while improved group behavior reduces future group accidents, illustrating lagged top‑down and bottom‑up effects on safety outcomes.

Abstract

The authors measured perceptions of safety climate, motivation, and behavior at 2 time points and linked them to prior and subsequent levels of accidents over a 5-year period. A series of analyses examined the effects of top-down and bottom-up processes operating simultaneously over time. In terms of top-down effects, average levels of safety climate within groups at 1 point in time predicted subsequent changes in individual safety motivation. Individual safety motivation, in turn, was associated with subsequent changes in self-reported safety behavior. In terms of bottom-up effects, improvements in the average level of safety behavior within groups were associated with a subsequent reduction in accidents at the group level. The results contribute to an understanding of the factors influencing workplace safety and the levels and lags at which these effects operate.