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Safety Science 78 (2015) 173178

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Safety Science
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ssci

Safety climate, safety behavior, and worker injuries in the Chinese


manufacturing industry
Xinxia Liu a,b, Guoxian Huang b, Huiqiang Huang b, Shuyu Wang b, Yani Xiao a, Weiqing Chen a,
a
Faculty of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology, School of Public Health, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China
b
Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Zhongshan, Guangdong, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: It is estimated that over 10,000,000 occupational injuries occur in China each year. This study explored
Received 8 October 2014 the relationships between four dimensions of safety climate (management commitment, safety supervi-
Received in revised form 31 March 2015 sion, coworker support, and safety training), three dimensions of safety behavior (safety compliance,
Accepted 27 April 2015
personal protective equipment, and safety initiatives), and occupational injuries among Chinese manu-
Available online 14 May 2015
facturing workers. A cross-sectional survey was conducted using a sample of 3970 manufacturing work-
ers from 42 companies in Zhongshan City, China. A structured questionnaire was used to capture
Keywords:
participants socio-demographic characteristics, occupational safety climate, occupational safety behav-
Occupational safety climate
Safety behavior
ior, and occupational injuries in the previous year. Path analysis was used to test the relationships
Unintentional occupational injury between safety climate, safety behavior and injuries at each workplace. The results revealed signicant
associations between different safety climates, safety behavior, and unintentional injuries, and provided
evidence that safety behavior strongly mediates the relationship between safety climate and uninten-
tional injuries. Our study reinforces the empirical association of occupational safety climate and safety
behavior with occupational injuries and identies some effective measures to prevent and control inju-
ries in Chinese workplaces.
2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction organization, promoting the safety program within the workplace,


demonstrating initiative, and putting effort into improving safety
A safety climate is the sum of employees shared perceptions of in the workplace.
the policies, procedures, and practices relating to safety in their In recent decades, it has been well documented that safety cli-
work environment (Zohar, 1980; Huang et al., 2006). Although mate is related to safety behavior and unintentional injuries in
the constructs used to assess safety climate have varied from study workplaces in Western countries. A recent meta-analytic review
to study, measured domains generally include management com- revealed that safety climates offer robust predictions of objective
mitment, supervisor support, safety awareness, safety training, safety criteria (the occurrence of occupational injury) and subjec-
safety policy, safety knowledge, safety communication, and tive safety criteria (better self-reported safety behavior) across
co-worker support (Seo et al., 2004; Olsen, 2010; O Connor et al., industries (Clarke, 2006a) and countries (Christian et al., 2009).
2011; Brondino et al., 2012; Huang et al., 2012). Moreover, it was found that a positive safety climate can encour-
Previous studies have used the theory of task and contextual age safe performance either through rewards or through principles
performance to divide safety behavior into two types: safety par- of social exchange (Zohar, 2000; Clarke, 2006b) and that safety cli-
ticipation and safety compliance (Grifn and Neal, 2000). Neal mate might indirectly affect safety behavior through some media-
et al. (2000) rstly dened safety compliance as complying with tion variables (Grifn and Neal, 2000; Zohar and Luria, 2003). A
safety procedures and carrying out work in a safe manner, and number of studies showed that safety climate was directly associ-
safety participation as a safety-oriented behavior that involves ated with safety performance (Zohar, 2000; Siu et al., 2004; Smith
the individual providing safety suggestions within the et al., 2006; Clarke, 2006a; Wu et al., 2008; Brondino et al., 2012;
Zohar et al., 2014). In contrast, Clarke found that safety climate
was signicantly related to safety behavior (i.e., safety participa-
Corresponding author. Tel.: +86 20 87332199; fax: +86 20 87330446.
tion and compliance), but weakly related to occupational injuries
E-mail addresses: xinxialiu@126.com (X. Liu), chenwq@mail.sysu.edu.cn
(Clarke, 2006a).
(W. Chen).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2015.04.023
0925-7535/ 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
174 X. Liu et al. / Safety Science 78 (2015) 173178

Due to Chinas rapid industrialization, occupational injuries survey, the content of the questionnaire, and how to complete it.
have become an important public health problem in recent dec- During the data collection, the investigators answered any queries
ades. The Chinese Ministry of Human Resources and Social raised by the workers. All of the questionnaires were immediately
Security (2012) reported that there were approximately 1.17 mil- checked for missing data or errors to ensure they were correctly
lion workplace injuries in 2012. However, the reason for the high completed.
occurrence of occupational injuries in China is still unclear. The
present study examined whether the association between safety
climate, safety behavior, and occupational injuries found in 2.3. Relevant measures
Western countries also exists in Chinese manufacturing
enterprises. 2.3.1. Occupational safety climate
Building on previous occupational safety climate scales (Varonen
and Mattila, 2000; Mearns et al., 2003; Cooper and Phillips, 2004;
2. Methods Huang et al., 2006; Lin et al., 2008; Lu and Tsai, 2008), we developed
an occupational safety climate scale in Chinese. Barbaranellis nd-
2.1. Participants ings provided initial empirical evidence of the cross-country mea-
surement equivalence of the safety climate scales (Barbaranelli
The convenience sampling method was used to select 50 man- et al., 2015). It consisted of twenty-two items, and each item was
ufacturing enterprises in Zhongshan City in Southern China for the rated on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = strongly agree, 2 = agree, 3 = nei-
study. The surveys were distributed between May 2011 and ther disagree nor agree, 4 = disagree, 5 = strongly disagree).
December 2012, and eight enterprises did not respond. Among Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was used to evaluate the safety cli-
the 42 enrolled enterprises, 19 were medium-size enterprise and mate scale. Variables with factor loadings of 0.45 or greater were
23 were small-size enterprises, involved in lighting processing, grouped and judgments were made about their applicability to an
metal, shoes, electronics, and toys. underlying concept (Pett et al., 2003). The KaiserMeyerOlkin
A retrospective survey was administered to the front-line pro- value of 0.94 indicated that the data were suitable for factor analy-
duction workers of the 42 enrolled enterprises. Of the 3970 work- sis, and the Bartlett Test of Sphericity (v2 = 42766.47, p < 0.01) sug-
ers who received the survey, 3375 completed the whole gested that correlations existed between some of the response
questionnaire, giving a response rate of 85.0%. The average age of categories. A reliability test was performed to evaluate the internal
the surveyed workers was 32.67 years (SD = 8.31) with a range consistency; the Cronbachs alpha coefcient of 0.70 is generally
from 18 to 59. The average years of experience in their current accepted as the minimum desired value (Litwin, 1995).
job was 6.71 years (SD = 5.82). Other demographic traits are shown The results of the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) of the safety
in Table 1. climate and reliability test are presented in Table 2. The factor

2.2. Data collection


Table 2
The selected workers were asked to complete a Factor loadings of the occupational safety climate scale.

self-administered structured questionnaire in Chinese asking Item description (variance proportion; Cronbachs alpha Factor
about their socio-demographic characteristics, perceived safety coefcient) loading
climate, occupational safety behavior, and work-related injuries Factor 1: Co-workers support(18.41%; 0.88)
in the past 12 months. Before the survey, several well-trained Coworkers mention safety compliance 0.802
investigators explained to all of the workers the objectives of Coworkers maintain safe conditions 0.797
Coworkers focus on their own work safety 0.716
Coworkers comply with safety procedures 0.685
Coworkers pay close attention to the safety of our team 0.662
Table 1
Demographic traits of participants. Factor 2: Management commitment(18.12%; 0.90)
Management invites employees to safety improvement 0.766
Demographic traits n % sessions
Gender Management encourages employees to participate in security 0.760
Male 2352 69.7 goal setting
Female 1023 30.3 Management encourages safety participation 0.753
Management accepts advice about safety 0.658
Marital status
Management is concerned about our well-being 0.632
Unmarried 835 24.8
Management offers enough safety information 0.492
Married 2424 71.8
Other 116 3.4 Factor 3: Safety supervision (15.63%; 0.86)
Supervisors frequently check the production situation 0.713
Educational level
Supervisors warn employees of no-smoking rules in the 0.701
Primary or below 366 10.8
workplace
Lower secondary 2100 62.2
Supervisors frequently check the PPE 0.681
Upper secondary 786 23.3
Supervisors frequently talk about safety 0.628
Tertiary or above 123 3.7
Supervisors draw employees attention to production safety 0.492
Years of work experience guides or warning labels
65 y 1821 54.0 Supervisors remind employees to wear PPE 0.473
615 y 1324 39.2
Safety training (10.52%; 0.73)
1625 y 195 5.8
I have been offered enough training in PPE 0.697
P26 y 35 1.0
I have been offered enough safety training during new staff 0.557
Monthly income (RMB) induction
61000 60 1.8 I had an occupational health examination during new staff 0.556
10012000 984 29.2 induction
20013000 1729 51.2 I have been offered enough training in health information 0.506
30014000 405 12.0 I have been offered regular and useful safety training 0.469
>4000 197 5.8
PPE: personal protective equipment.
X. Liu et al. / Safety Science 78 (2015) 173178 175

analysis identied four factors that explained 62.7% of the total bruising). In this study, only the serious and moderate injuries
variance. According to the nature and content of the items included were included in the nal data analysis.
in each factor, the four factors were as follows: coworker support, The injury frequency was transformed by logit transformation
management commitment, safety supervision, and safety training. (Fullarton and Stokes, 2007) to make the data suitable for regres-
The Cronbachs alpha coefcients were high, ranging from 0.73 to sion analyses such as path analysis. The frequency of injuries (i)
0.90. was divided by the number of employees (N) for each site (g).
This provided a measure of the injury risk at each site. The injury
data display a Poisson distribution, and as such, did not t a normal
2.3.2. Occupational safety behavior distribution (Hosmer and Lemeshow, 2000). The transformed log
We used onsite observations and discussions with occupational scores were then made negative to return the direction of scores,
physicians and safety managers to develop a Chinese scale to mea- where the scores become larger when transformed. This variable,
sure workers occupational safety behavior. Each of the twenty-one thereafter referred to as injury probability, was calculated as
items asked a participant to state how often he followed the rele- follows:
vant behavior; for example, Use the machine shield correctly. 0 1
Each item was rated on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = always, ig
b g  log @ Ng
2 = mostly, 3 = occasionally, 4 = never, and 5 = never encounter). Y  A
i
The factor analysis identied three factors that explained 56.66% 1  Ngg
of the total variance. Based on the nature and contents of the items
included in each factor, the three factors were dened as follows:
personal protective equipment, safety compliance, and safety 2.4. Statistical analyses
initiatives.The KaiserMeyerOlkin value was 0.90 and the
Bartlett Test of Sphericity was v2 = 34630.14 (p < 0.01). The The database was constructed using EpiData 3.0. Missing data
Cronbachs alpha coefcients were high, ranging from 0.77 to accounted for no more than 2% of any variable and were imputed
0.89 (Table 3). using the mean replacement method.
Descriptive statistics and correlations between variables were
computed using SPSS 17.0 for Windows. Path analysis was per-
2.3.3. The work-related injury experience formed with Amos 20.0. To examine the signicance of each path,
In this study, a work-related injury was dened as any injury the signicance levels of the regression parameters for the rela-
that occurred at the workplace; the workplace was dened as tionship between the variables in the estimated models (path coef-
any location in which the worker was present in the course of cients) were denoted by the critical ratio or t-value
his or her duties. All of the workers were asked whether they (t-value > 1.96, p < .05), and the chi-square test was used to evalu-
had been injured at work during the past 12 months. The responses ate the t. The model t was considered to be good if the
were coded as 1 for yes and 0 for No. The frequency and sever- goodness-of-t (GFI), the Comparative Fit Index (CFI), and the
ity of the injuries were also recorded. Injuries were categorized as Tucker-Lewis index (TLI) were greater than 0.95, the root mean
serious injuries (required hospital treatment), moderate injuries square error of approximation (RMSEA) was less than 0.05, and
(involving at least a days work lost), and light injuries (needed the normed chi-square index (v2/df ratio) was less than 3.0
immediate treatment but did not inuence work, such as minor (Kline, 2005).

Table 3
3. Results
Factor loadings of safety behavior scale.

Item description (variance proportion; Cronbachs alpha Factor 3.1. Inter-correlations between occupational safety climate, behavior,
coefcient) loading
and injury
Personal protective equipment (22.23%; 0.89)
Wear respirators or breathing mask 0.842
The descriptive statistics and inter-correlations between the
Wear ear defenders in noisy workplace 0.818
Wear gloves as safety procedure 0.763
latent variables of occupational safety climate, behavior, and
Wear gloves while using chemicals 0.763 work-related injury are presented in Table 4. Except for the corre-
Use the machine shield correctly 0.728 lations between coworker support and personal protective
Wear respirator although there is a local ventilation system in 0.710 equipment, between safety supervision and personal protec-
workplace
tive equipment, and between safety training and
Replace my respirator regularly 0.706
Wear ear defenders in noisy workplace, even when talking 0.686 work-related injuries, the correlations between the variables
with coworkers were signicant with correlation coefcients ranging from 0.068
Safety compliance (17.23%; 0.89) to 0.712.
Turn off the power and inform the supervisory when a machine 0.736
is working abnormally
Adjust posture at work to avoid fatigue 0.705 3.2. Path analysis
Do not smoke in workplace 0.592
Use a tool to adjust a dangerous part of a machine 0.588 The path model t the data well (GFI = 0.999; CFI = 0.996;
Use a cart or other hand barrow when carrying heavy goods 0.588
TLI = 0.992; RMSEA = 0.011; v2/df = 1.385). The path coefcients
Stop working when not offered protective equipment 0.584
Read instruction manual carefully before I use a new machine 0.548
in the path diagrams showed that the occupational safety climates
Clean work bench before going off-duty 0.544 may affect the work-related injuries indirectly through occupa-
Safety initiatives (17.21%; 0.77)
tional safety behavior (Fig. 1). Both safety supervision and man-
Read material safety data sheet before using a new chemical 0.839 agement commitment to safety reduced the work-related injuries
Check the containers to prevent chemicals from leaking 0.824 by improving personal protective equipment use, safety compli-
Cover the containers after using chemicals 0.797 ance, and safety initiatives.Coworkers support decreased the
Inform the supervisory of chemicals without labels 0.697
work-related injury by promoting personal equipment use and
Use local ventilation equipment to discharge poisonous waste 0.587
safety compliance, whereas safety training lessened the
176 X. Liu et al. / Safety Science 78 (2015) 173178

Table 4
Inter-correlation matrix for safety climate, safety behavior, and work-related injury.

Mean SD CS MC SS ST PPE SI SC
CS 1.998 0.468
MC 2.099 0.570 0.695**
SS 1.871 0.484 0.619** 0.712**
ST 2.216 0.517 0.485** 0.540** 0.540**
PPE 1.376 0.768 0.022 0.068** 0.016 0.099**
SI 1.833 0.818 0.169** 0.232** 0.324** 0.174** 0.192**
SC 2.258 1.375 0.213** 0.268** 0.293** 0.157** 0.298** 0.629**
INJ N/A 0.068** 0.155** 0.201** 0.020 0.160** 0.243** 0.267**

N/A: not applicable.


MC: management commitment; SS: safety supervision; CS: coworker support; ST: safety training; PPE: personal protective equipment; SI: safety initiatives; SC: safety
compliance; INJ: injury.
**
p < 0.01.

SS
PPE

CS
SC
INJ

MC
SI

ST

Fig. 1. Path model with occupational safety climates as predictors, occupational safety behavior as mediators, and work-related injuries as outcomes. MC: management
commitment; SS: safety supervision; CS: coworker support; ST: safety training; PPE: personal protective equipment; SI: safety initiatives; SC: safety compliance; INJ: injury

p < 0.01. p < 0.05.

Table 5
Direct, indirect, and total effects of occupational safety climate and behavior on work-related injury.

ST MC CS SS SI SC PPE
SI
Direct effect 0.114** 0.301**
Indirect effect
Total effect 0.114** 0.301**
SC
Direct effect 0.169** 0.119** 0.127**
Indirect effect
Total effect 0.169** 0.119** 0.127**
PPE
Direct effect 0.121** 0.064** 0.043* 0.116**
Indirect effect
Total effect 0.121** 0.064** 0.043* 0.116**
Work-related injury
Direct effect 0.130** 0.145** 0.146**
Indirect effect 0.018 0.049 0.011 0.041
Total effect 0.018 0.049 0.011 0.041 0.130** 0.145** 0.146**

MC: management commitment; SS: safety supervision; CS: coworker support; ST: safety training; PPE: personal protective equipment; SI: safety initiatives; SC: safety
compliance.
*
P < 0.05.
**
P < 0.01.

work-related injuries by increasing the use of personal protective work-related injuries. Of all the standardized total effects, the
equipment. absolute value of the use of personal protective equipment was
Table 5 shows the estimates of the standardized direct, indirect, the greatest, followed by safety compliance, safety initiative,
and total effects of occupational safety climates and behavior on management commitment, safety supervision, safety
X. Liu et al. / Safety Science 78 (2015) 173178 177

training, and coworker support.For the standardized direct techniques such as increasing support with incentive policies to
effects, the absolute value of the use of personal protective equip- strengthen supervision and promote safe behavior.
ment was the greatest, followed by safety compliance and Management commitment (MC) (b = 0.169, p < 0.001) was the
safety initiative. For the standardized indirect effects, the abso- most proximal antecedent of safety compliance behavior and had
lute value of the use of management commitment was the great- an indirect effect on occupational injury. Like the SS dimension,
est, followed by safety supervision, safety training, and MC also had a signicant effect on three dimensions of safety
coworker support. behavior. These results were consistent with previous scholars
conclusions that MC is a major factor in safety climate and is crit-
ical to employee safety performance (Christian et al., 2009). Kao
4. Discussion used a structural equation model to test the relationship between
management commitment and safety performance, including
The results of this study suggest that safety climate predicts safety initiatives, compliance behavior, and occupational injury
safety behavior, and that safety behavior mediates the relationship (Kao et al., 2009). Their ndings revealed that MC had no direct
between safety climate and occupational injury in China. These correlation with compliance behavior and injury, but a positive
ndings are in line with previous studies in other countries correlation with SI, which was partly consistent with the results
(Hofmann and Stetzer, 1996; Cavazza and Serpe, 2009). In their of our study. MC assesses the extent to which people perceive that
meta-analysis, Christian et al. (2009) developed a theoretical management values safety, how they communicate safety issues,
model in which safety climate was the antecedent of safety perfor- and their actions that support safety. MC is a sign of the extent
mance and had an indirect effect on occupational injury through to which top management demonstrates positive and supportive
safety performance. The study of mediation factors is important attitudes toward worker safety. In China, when top management
because it allows us to understand the mechanisms through which is committed to safety, they may set goals for safe production,
safety climate operates on workers behavior and reduces the risk establish an occupational safety management organization,
of injury. Our study established empirical links between specic increase communication and feedback, and provide enough sup-
dimensions of safety climate, such as safety supervision (SS), man- port and resources for safety activities. All of these measures help
agement commitment (MC), coworker support (CS), safety training increase the three types of safety behavior.
(ST), and safety behavior, such as safety initiates (SI), personal pro- Safety training was positively associated with the use of per-
tective equipment (PPE), and safety compliance (SC). SS and MC sonal protective equipment (b = 0.121, p < 0.001). However, in the
had a positive relationship with three different dimensions of present study the SSSI and SSSC paths were
safety behavior. Safety initiatives (SI), personal protective equip- non-signicant, indicating that safety training did not signicantly
ment (PPE), and safety compliance (SC) had similar associations alter safety behavior encourage employees to comply with safety
with occupational injury. procedures. This is not consistent with previous studies (Cooper
Our results revealed that safety supervision (SS) was the most and Phillips, 2004; Huang et al., 2012), which suggested that safety
proximal antecedent of safety initiative behavior, which also training (one dimension of the safety climate) could predict the
increased the use of PPE and employees safety compliance. actual levels of safety behavior among manufacturing employees.
Zohar and Luria (2003) carried out an intervention in which super- Our results may reect the fact that in China, safety training is
visors were trained to participate in safety-oriented communica- mainly for new employees and aimed at improving their safety
tion with subordinate workers; they found that the intervention knowledge (i.e., operating the machine correctly and wearing
reduced minor injury rates and increased PPE use. In a study of PPE). Other types of daily safety training are conducted sporadi-
the maintenance of heavy duty equipment, Zohar (2002) found cally and have limited effects on safety behavior.
that improved communication between line workers and supervi- Personal protective equipment, safety compliance, and initia-
sors resulted in decreasing micro accidents and increasing PPE use. tive behavior were all associated with lower rates of
Sampson suggested that supervisors use of communication had a self-reported occupational injury (b = 0.146, b = 0.145, b = 0.130,
positive effect on safety compliance and safety participation p < 0.001). Our ndings about EFA support the trend in the occupa-
(Sampson et al., 2014). According to the LeaderMemberexchan tional safety research literature toward conceptualizing safety
ge (LMX) theory (Graen and Uhl-Bien, 1995), supervisors can behavior as multi-dimensional (Grifn and Neal, 2000; Martnez-
increase safety initiatives among employees by inspiring safety Crcoles et al., 2011; Zhang and Wu, 2014). For example, in this
and improving PPE use, and they can increase employees safety study, personal protective equipment was distinguished from
compliance by using safety monitoring (Grifn and Hu, 2013). safety compliance behavior as in the other recent studies
Our results expanded upon these ndings by suggesting that com- (Cavazza and Serpe, 2009; Arcury et al., 2012; Tholn et al.,
munication between supervisors and workers might also improve 2013). According to the American National Safety Council, failure
the safety behavior of workers. to use protective gear provided at the workplace accounts for
Coworker support (CS) was also an important dimension of approximately 40% of work accidents (Olson et al., 2009). Safety
safety climate. Our results showed that coworker support was pos- compliance refers to voluntary behavior that is required to carry
itively associated with SC and PPE (b = 0.119, p < 0.001; b = 0.043, out normal operations and safety initiatives. PPE, SC, and SI had
p < 0.05). Work group safety mainly involved coworkers involve- similar effects on lowering the occurrence of occupational injury,
ment in and commitment to safety issues: if an employee per- suggesting that future interventions in manufacturing industries
ceived that his/her coworkers were concerned about safety, the should pay more attention to the three dimensions of safety
whole group tended to practice safe behavior (Hayes et al., behavior.
1998). In a study of manufacturing industries in Italy, researchers Although this study extends the existing safety climate litera-
showed that coworkers safety climate had a stronger inuence ture by demonstrating several safety climatebehaviorinjury
on safety behavior, especially on safety participation, than supervi- relationships, it has some limitations worth mentioning. First, like
sors safety climate (Brondino et al., 2012). However, in our study, other safety climate studies, the results of this study were derived
the path CSSI was non-signicant, indicating that in Chinese man- from a cross-sectional survey, preventing us from making deni-
ufacturing groups, the mutual inuence between colleagues is not tive causal conclusions due to the nature of the cross-sectional
sufcient to encourage workers to participate in active safety design. In further eld studies, a longitudinal design could be used
behavior. It is necessary for higher-level managers, using to clarify these associations. We used a self-reported questionnaire
178 X. Liu et al. / Safety Science 78 (2015) 173178

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