Modelling employee attitudes to safety: a comparison across sectors

This paper describes the modeling of employee attitudes to safety in three industrial sectors operating in the UK. Gauging employee attitudes to safety has become an increasingly important method of appraising human factors issues in many organizations. This study is based on data collected from a large survey (n = 2429) of employee attitudes to safety. It attempts to describe the subjective architectures, or explicative model, of employee attitudes to safety in these sectors by relating these attitudes to their appraisals of commitment to safety in their organization. A comparison of models across sector models is also made. The data support the claim that the architecture of attitudes to safety is, at least in part, dependent on the industrial context, or work environment. Differences were found in factor mean scores as well as differences in the relationships between factors in structural equation models for each sector. The models showed that perceptions of management actions and safety training were ...

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