Abstract
A safety climate is an organizational environment that leads members of an organization to give consideration to safety or take safety actions. To further secure the safety of nuclear power plants, it is of the utmost importance that people holding managerial positions in an organization have a good understanding of the characteristics of the safety climate of the organization and implement safety promotion activities effectively.
In the current study, we analyzed the structure of safety climate rating scales and the characteristics of rating values by duty position using four questionnaire surveys that were consecutively conducted targeting technical engineers of section chief level and lower working at three nuclear power plants.
In studying the rating scales, we extracted six factors by conducting a factor analysis on the study data in fiscal 2003, and selected five items each that are closely related to each of the six factors. The six factors were named “safety attitude of organization," “attitude of immediate superior," “safety education in workplace," “actions of safety consideration," “morals," and “confidence in knowledge and skills."
The result of the four surveys revealed the following consistent tendency: 1) In comparing rating values of employees in managerial positions and regular employees, the rating values of employees in managerial positions were higher than those of regular employees for all rating scales; and 2) In comparing the rating values of regular employees after they were divided into four age groups: 29 and under, 30s, 40s and 50 and older, for five rating scales other than “confidence in knowledge and skills," the older they were, the lower the rating values were. For “confidence in knowledge and skills," the older they were, the higher the rating values were.
To study the criterion-related validity as a rating scale of the safety climate, we analyzed correlation with the number of problems as an external criterion. Since the rating values differed depending on the duty position, we studied correlation with the number of problems after the objects were divided into two groups: regular employees and employees in managerial positions. As a result, for the rating values of five factors, namely, “safety attitude of organization," “attitude of immediate superior," “safety education in workplace," “actions of safety consideration" and “morals," there was negative correlation with the number of problems in both duty positions. Only the correlation with the rating values of “safety attitude of organization" was statistically significant for the rating values of regular employees, while for employees in managerial positions, the correlation with all the rating values of the five factors was statistically significant. On the other hand, the correlation between the number of problems and the rating values of “confidence in knowledge and skills" was not statistically significant for either regular employees or employees in managerial positions.
As described, five of the six factors other than “confidence in knowledge and skills, namely, “safety attitude of organization," “attitude of immediate superior," “safety education in workplace," “actions of safety consideration" and “morals," are sub-factors of the safety climate. Furthermore, through these analyses, it is clear that the safety climate is an organizational environment that is perceived by the interaction of organizational and individual characteristics.
