How Organizational Support Can Cultivate a Multilevel Safety Climate in the Construction Industry

Abstract

Safety climate has a positive impact on safety performance in the construction industry; it is a multilevel phenomenon that can be formed at the organization and group levels, especially in large organizations with a multilevel management structure. This study investigates how organizational support cascades down to cultivate a group-level safety climate at two time points over a 2-year period through a relationship with an organization-level safety climate, supervisory safety-specific transformation leadership, and coworker support in a large US-based construction contractor. Structural equation modeling analysis on data from an online survey among 284 construction professionals shows, unlike prior research, that organizational support at one point in time does not directly predict a subsequent group-level safety climate. Instead, it affects the group-level safety climate through the mediation effect of supervisory safety-specific transformational leadership and organization-level safety climate and its moderating effect on the relationship between coworker support and group-level safety climate. Importantly, the results also suggest that safety-specific transformational leadership may be an even more important predictor of group-level safety climate than organization-level safety climate and coworker support. These results imply that organizational support could focus on empowering leaders to demonstrate safety-specific transformational leadership behaviors for the sake of promoting a group-level safety climate.